The Confusion of Success with the Meaning of Life

Some strains of Darwinian secularism are speckled throughout with signs of the mansions and vast estates of their most prominent promoters. Such appears to be the case with Matt Ridley's philosophy, as presented in George Gilder's review of his book The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves:

Reason, to Ridley's mind, impels us relentlessly forward and upward. Religion, on the other hand, he sees as a reactionary obstacle to growth, progress, and even morality. He cites, for example, the indignation of Israel's prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel, along with Homer, against the pride of the Phoenician traders as typical rants of reactionary traditionalists against the creators of wealth.

Instead — echoing his previous books on the evolution of virtue and the superiority of sexual reproduction to reduplicative cloning — Ridley maintains that moral codes naturally evolve from the rise of catallaxy. Cultures that reach out to immigrants and new ideas gain cultural and genetic innovation. As wealth grows, population growth relents; women instead release their energies into the marketplace.

Reason does not have a self-contained direction; it is dependent on circumstances. To those not living on the proceeds of best-selling books, reason alone may very well lead to the conclusion that the world is cold, unfair, and irrational, and life utterly pointless. Religion, in such circumstances, can reorder the individual's sense of reason toward productive ends.

This is no linguistic nitpicking; it is a thematic problem with analyses such as Ridley's. Reason is what allows humankind to take evolution into its own hands in ways broad and discrete, but it requires a larger principle to give it direction. The reference to "immigration and new ideas" is a perfect example: Such intermingling is only fruitful where it provides new perspective on existing principles, and the application of human reason must begin with an assessment of what is worth preserving and what is dangerously attractive. It supposes too much correspondence between cultural evolution and biological evolution to assume a parallel process of "good decisions" through trial and error judged by rates of survival.

As I'm able, I'm reading a book titled The Art Instinct by Denis Dutton, in which the author strives to argue that art is both something more than, say, the weaving of bird nests and something growing out of human evolution. So thoroughly dedicated to the principle of genetic development as a human determinant is Dutton that, in one passage, he gives the impression that he believes that it took a genetic mutation for mankind to cease jumping from cliffs. Those disinclined to such behavior survived, while the other perished. But surely it wouldn't have taken too advanced a brain to notice a bloody lifeless pulp at the bottom of a high drop and to conclude that jumping would not be wise and, moreover, to warn others of that finding.

Such is the function of reason. Even so, a precondition of its application is the principle that it is better to live than to plummet to death. That brings us back to Gilder's review:

That a secular-feminist society, feeding on hedonic incentives, can ultimately sustain a functional national defense capable of standing up to the Vandals and Goths of the 21st century is yet to be proven, but the portents are unpromising. Europe is dismantling its military, while the U.S. increasingly regards its own chiefly as an arena for sex-role gaming.

Cultural innovations may benefit individuals for a period of time, but what is supposed to set human beings apart is our ability to foresee pitfalls and to step around them and to carry non-biological lessons from the past that tell us which paths are likely to be perilous. We do so through mechanisms of religion and tradition.

An Argument for a Burqa Ban

The Islamic practice of women's veiling, extending to the absurd and offensive burqa, presents difficult questions for the West. Who are we, we wonder, to trample other cultures voluntarily perpetuated? Worse yet is the question of whether a society can stop intolerance once it has granted itself permission to discriminate against that which it finds offensive.

Yet, journalist Claire Berlinski argues that veiling itself tends to be a metastasizing intolerance:

... the burqa must be banned. All forms of veiling must be, if not banned, strongly discouraged and stigmatized. The arguments against a ban are coherent and principled. They are also shallow and insufficient. They fail to take something crucial into account, and that thing is this: If Europe does not stand up now against veiling — and the conception of women and their place in society that it represents — within a generation there will be many cities in Europe where no unveiled woman will walk comfortably or safely. ...

The debate in Europe now concerns primarily the burqa, not less restrictive forms of veiling, such as the headscarf. The sheer outrageousness of the burqa makes it an easy target, as does the political viability of justifying such a ban on security grounds, particularly in the era of suicide bombings, even if such a justification does not entirely stand up to scrutiny. But the burqa is simply the extreme point on the continuum of veiling, and all forced veiling is not only an abomination, but contagious: Unless it is stopped, the natural tendency of this practice is to spread, for veiling is a political symbol as well as a religious one, and that symbol is of a dynamic, totalitarian ideology that has set its sights on Europe and will not be content until every woman on the planet is humbled, submissive, silent, and enslaved.

To be sure, the United States is nowhere near such a point, but even here, the intellectual dynamic exposed by the questions has relevance. Neither the Constitution nor the principle of tolerance should be a suicide pact, and sometimes it may be the case that one side in a cultural battle will inevitably prevail and wipe out the very rules of competition that enables such thorough pluralism. There may be no rational reason for veiling to win over liberty, from an enlightened standpoint, but it is utterly predictable of human beings to behave irrationally and to rationalize.

Berlinski hits the core of the matter when she asserts that there is no such "thing as a neighborhood where the veil is the cultural norm and yet no judgment is passed upon women who do not wear it." In agreement with her subsequent assertion that "our culture's position on these questions is morally superior," one is inclined to suggest that we let those neighborhoods pass judgment, and dismiss them when they do so. Provided no violence transpires and the law does not ultimately flip from allowing the practice to imposing it, we can expect no legal shield against interpersonal judgment. And if the particular neighborhood in which the shifting attitudes is a concern, then we must individually fight the cultural fight.

The concern, ultimately, is that the West lacks the confidence to pass its own judgment when the rule isn't written into the law. There's a tendency — emanating from our "nation of laws" mentality — to feel as if anything not codified into law is too ambiguous to form so strong a personal or group opinion about that we impose compliance as a condition of our personal good will. The foundation of that self-doubting ideology is clear: it gains the upper hand in the intrawestern culture war if the law demarks legitimate judgment and values are banned from the "whereas" clauses of legislation.

The fatal flaw, however — the dangerous risk — is that the shallowness of a libertine society won't form the basis of adequate cultural confidence to defend against foreign principles that don't begin with the assumption of tolerance.

The Living and the Dead

One of the peculiarities that native Rhode Islanders perhaps do not even notice about their state — at least in the East Bay — is the proliferation of historical cemeteries, tucked into suburban and urban corners alike, here and there, such as this unkempt one on Water St., in Portsmouth:

George Carlin used to have a bit in which he suggested that all cemeteries and golf courses be sacrificed in the name of affordable housing. Taking up the economic calamity of such a move would be beyond my purpose, here, and it may be sufficient, anyway, to warn against preventing the intrusion of mortality and heritage into our daily routines.

What might remain of bodies interred some hundred and fifty years ago, I do not know, when even the stone etchings have faded such as to make reading difficult. With the aid of a type-written sheet of paper, sheathed in plastic on the site, however, the visitor can associate some names with the stones, thus parting with an explanation, upon turning back toward East Main Rd., for Child St. (Although, whether George Franklin, Jonathan, Lidia, William Henry, Joseph, or Harriet merited the honorarium is lost to history. Perhaps the honored Child lies beneath one of the faded, illegible stones, or perhaps the entire clan was the namesake.) Erasing the dead from the landscape would be akin to naming every road by its place and purpose, just as Portsmouth has East Main, West Main, joined by Union, with Middle right where one would expect.

In a faded and indistinct way, these daily encounters with our foregoers bring the same lessons that are incidental to Michael Morse's work as an EMT:

A few hours later, I returned to the ER with somebody else, but took the time to visit them. He was lucid now, she smiled as I shook his hand and deflected the genuine thanks he offered, saying the usual "it's my job" things. I don't remember what caused his confusion, his blood work was way out of whack, IV fluids and whatever else they gave him at the hospital worked wonders. He was funny, and kind, and appreciative. So was she. I was happy to have helped them. It was a "good" call.

I saw his picture on the obituary page two days later. He died that night. At least he walked out of the place he raised his family under his own power, and into whatever existence waits.

Two years later, another call brings him to take the she along the same path. Michael recalls her graciousness when he'd attended her husband's wake and how a certain respect had attached to his occupational proximity to the living's passing on to death.

Of course, we're all, every day, dealing with people on their way to the grave, gathering associations and memories, making impressions. Whoever's names the addresses of the living bear, the blocks, the towns, the regions that they inhabit carry the sense of them, even if that sense will pass with us. Let graveyards, then, stand as a reminder that we mark the ground on which we tread no less than the ground in which we lie.

In a recently reprinted column for the Rhode Island Catholic, Bishop Thomas Tobin summarizes a relevant theme in Jesus' teachings:

The first lesson is the reminder of how foolish it is to accumulate and then depend on material possessions. Remember the parable Jesus told about the rich man who built up huge barns to store his bountiful harvest? The complacent man said to himself, "You have so many things stored up for many years; rest, eat, drink and be merry." But God said to him, "You fool, this very night your life will be demanded of you; and the things you have prepared, to whom will they belong?" Jesus concludes by teaching that we should try to grow rich "in what matters to God." (Luke 12:16-21) ...

Towards the end of the Sermon on the Mount Jesus urged His disciples to be less anxious and more trusting. "Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink, or about your body, what you will wear . . . Your Heavenly Father knows that you need them all . . . Can any of you by worrying add a single moment to your life-span? Do not worry about tomorrow; tomorrow will take care of itself." (Mt 6: 25-34)

Though the annunciations of our existences will dissipate with the wind and water, whether written in stone or in the reflections of those with whom we interact, these things are not all. Tomorrow will take care of itself, ultimately, in its material particulars, but the immaterial about today, its dreams and intentions, whether the will is good or ill, represents in us that which will never be buried.

On "Giving Back"

Kimberly Dennis summarizes a cliché in such a way as to give me hope that maybe differing perspectives really are just a clarification away from harmonization (via Paul Caron, via Glenn Reynolds):

Successful entrepreneurs-turned-philanthropists typically say they feel a responsibility to "give back" to society. But "giving back" implies they have taken something. What, exactly, have they taken? Yes, they have amassed great sums of wealth. But that wealth is the reward they have earned for investing their time and talent in creating products and services that others value. They haven't taken from society, but rather enriched us in ways that were previously unimaginable.

No. "Giving back" implies that they have received something that they did not create. Inasmuch as even the most rags-to-riches story is a far cry from an entrepreneur's inventing the world from primordial muck, it is clearly true that the broader society has at the very least created the conditions in which his or her success was possible. That's especially true for entrepreneurs, like Bill Gates, whose story is more of the riches-to-more-riches variety.

Glenn Reynolds brings into the conversation philanthropy's sense of being Christian, but the point of Christian charity is not for the haves to make token gestures toward economic equilibrium. It's to offer imitative thanks to the living God whom the giver is supposed to see in the recipient. The notion translates directly into secular terms as an expression of gratitude — and, one might say, debt — to a cultural and civic structure.

Business-minded libertarians, among whom Dennis appears to count, may respond to that call by advocating for freedom and donating to market-bolstering causes. Others may shoot for the more fundamental targets of diminishing starvation and disease. And still others see continued investment in their personal vocations — whether medicine, high-tech inventions, financial investment, or any other capitalistic venture — to be their most valuable possible contribution.

Insisting that this point be acknowledged does not indicate that one begrudges the success or dismisses the inventiveness of capitalism's beneficiaries. But "giving back" isn't (or shouldn't be) penance in the form of an offering to the undeserving. It's recognition that, even to the extent that luck was not decisive, community conditions might have been, and a freely expressed hope that those conditions can continue to benefit others who are deserving.

What Brevity Should Mean

Commenter David P. offers an insightful comment to my post on technology and brain development:

Newspeak, the language invented by George Orwell for "1984," nicely illustrates the connection between language and docility. In creating Newspeak the Party simplified the vocabulary as much as possible by eliminating many synonyms so that, for example, all the variations of good and bad, such as outstanding, horrible, etc. were reduced to "good" and "ungood." Degrees of goodness or badness were indicated by adding the prefixes "plus" or "double plus" so that something really bad would be described and "double plus ungood." Orwell posited that by reducing the ability to express ideas, the ability to actually have ideas and think about them would atrophy. It seems to me that reducing the space in which to express an idea to a text or twitter screen can have the same effect.

The irony — I suppose you could call it — with "reducing the space" for communication is that it really ought to suggest language that is more full, as in poetry, rather than more empty. The word "horrific" contains much more information than the phrase "double plus ungood," let alone a text-like shorthand of "bad." (I'm sure there's an acronym of which I'm unaware.)

The problem is that it's a little bit more work to come up with just the right word to capture the nature of the deed and the speaker's reaction to it than to offer a catch-all catch phrase. The brevity of texting, as of newspeak, is brevity not just of language, but of thought. That is what makes it the road to manipulated slavery.

If all ungood acts have the same label, then what matters is not so much the criticism, but who offers it in what circumstances, which will always favor those in power.

Let Them Play

So now it's recess. Well, as a former high-energy boy, I'm not sure what I'd done if I had been forced to while away all the hours of the school day in a structured environment. Back in my day, we had a morning and afternoon recess (plus a lunch break!). The promise of those pending breaks are what got me through the hours spent in class. I knew that after math, I'd be back playing kickball or whatever else. And yeah, I'd have to go back into class, but the physical energy spent somehow helped to focus my young mind on the task at hand. Funny how that works.

But now we're told there just isn't enough time in the day to meet all of the requirements demanded by government and, implicitly, parents. So traditional recess of the free-form variety is being done away in favor of a more structured version. Just what our kids need: more structure in their already too-structured play time.

My wife, a member of our school's PTO who is at the school most days, has told me how she watches the kids at recess and that they have no clue how to play by themselves. For instance, soccer games quickly devolve into anything goes free-for-alls where the ball is usually carried (more like rugby). That's why there are programs in some schools that are actually teaching kids how to play. How sad. But at least these programs are aimed at giving the tools and ability to play on their own. A shorter, more structured "recess" will do just the opposite.

The problem is that we've raised--and continue to raise--a generation that thinks it needs adult supervision to play a game. Self-organizing doesn't happen. Kids are over-scheduled in their free time, whether it be dance or sports or karate or whatever. Too often, instead of fostering an interest, these organized forms of recreation end up being the only kind that kids get. Recess is one of the last places where they can just do what kids are supposed to do: play.

Generation Why Bother

I guess it's among the hardships of wealth. Jeff Opdyke laments that his son doesn't have the drive that he did, as a teenager, to earn money, mostly because he and his wife have admittedly been a bit too generous:

We get a lot of satisfaction in doing that. But it comes with a pretty big downside—one we're only now beginning to grasp. Because of it, our son, who understands money far better than his young sister at this point, doesn't understand what it means to pay his own freight. He has learned to count on Mom and Dad.

I remember, at a very young age, walking around my apartment complex trying to sell toys that I no longer wanted. At one point, I set up a stand on a semi-main road selling pictures that I'd drawn. (I think I charged a quarter each, tacking on another dime if the picture was signed.) My career advanced to soccer referee and then record-store retail.

Perhaps the objects of desire make a difference. At thirteen and younger, I mainly wanted action figures and comic books, which had a low enough price tag that the work translated quickly into things. It seems that higher ticket items are more prominent these days — videogames and iphones and such — which probably contributes to the nonchalance of Opdyke's son at the prospect of making a few bucks mowing lawns.

Although, there's surely something cultural in play, whether broadly (covering most families) or narrowly (depending on the attitudes of nearby friends). My friends and I would patrol miles of neighborhoods selling the service of snow shoveling.

Of course, there's the opposing concern of parents:

[A former colleague's] daughter, on the other hand, "always had jobs when she was old enough, and offers the opposite lesson," my friend says. "She worked too hard and didn't enjoy herself enough when she had the opportunity. Now she has a full-time job, has her two weeks off, and I think she missed out."

Missed out on what? A teenager's job becomes part of the experience of youth. And without enough money to keep up with peers, kids can miss out anyway. I started down my path of debt when my first credit card arrived just in time to allow me to go on a beech vacation with my late-teenage pals. If I hadn't already had experience with what it means to work, I'd probably be in an even deeper hole, now, and with less natural drive to work my way out of it.

It's a complaint of every generation of parents, no doubt, but it feels as if the times aren't helping — what with all of the comforts and distractions, on one hand, and the well-honed traps that make spending money easy. As Opdyke suggests, "physical, maybe even uncomfortable, low-paying work" can be a healthy experience, of itself, if it serves to motivate young adults, but with the wireless glow of gadgets all around and the comforts of even working class homes, the lesson of "why bother" can take some effort to impart.

Just Be Better

Lexington Green wonders where the ruling class gets the nerve:

Why does an elite that is actually not admirable in what it does, and not effective or productive, that has added little or nothing of value to the civilizational stock, that cannot possibly do the things it claims it can do, that services rent-seekers and the well-connected, that believes in an incoherent mishmash of politically correct platitudes, that is parasitic, have such an elevated view of itself?

He proffers as three planes of potential justifiable confidence the material, the intellectual, and the moral and then takes a decidedly negative approach toward a remedy:

It seems to me this group is vulnerable to strategic, permanent defeat if the conversation and the spot-light can be relentlessly focused on their deficiencies and the ludicrous nature of much of their behavior and their beliefs.

I'm as guilty as anybody of shining that negative light; in the quick-hit commentary that is the only thing for which economic reality has left me time, it's the most efficient means of affecting the conversation. And there is a place for pointing out error and mocking the arrogant and powerful.

Looking away from the world of opinion writing and wonkishness, the more effective approach is probably to highlight the positive. Mockery only shames those with a reason to believe that people about whose opinions they care will find uncomfortable truth in it, and the defining characteristic of our ruling class is its insulation from the trials of everyday American life. The long-term realignment of priorities, principles, and power would be better served simply by those outside of the ruling class proving themselves just to be plain ol' better people.

Like a soothing breeze over stagnant water, exemplary conduct will draw away the haughty until the pool has evaporated, but for the dregs.

What's in the Water for Whom

There's a narrative in the air, and I herein offer only a few glances from my evening reading. Turn to Peggy Noonan for the general theme:

But do our political leaders have any sense of what people are feeling deep down? They don't act as if they do. I think their detachment from how normal people think is more dangerous and disturbing than it has been in the past. ...

But I've never seen the gap wider than it is now. I think it is a chasm. In Washington they don't seem to be looking around and thinking, Hmmm, this nation is in trouble, it needs help. They're thinking something else. I'm not sure they understand the American Dream itself needs a boost, needs encouragement and protection. They don't seem to know or have a sense of the mood of the country. ...

An irony here is that if we stopped the illegal flow and removed the sense of emergency it generates, comprehensive reform would, in time, follow. Because we're not going to send the estimated 10 million to 15 million illegals already here back. We're not going to put sobbing children on a million buses. That would not be in our nature. (Do our leaders even know what's in our nature?) As years passed, those here would be absorbed, and everyone in the country would come to see the benefit of integrating them fully into the tax system. So it's ironic that our leaders don't do what in the end would get them what they say they want, which is comprehensive reform.

When the adults of a great nation feel long-term pessimism, it only makes matters worse when those in authority take actions that reveal their detachment from the concerns—even from the essential nature—of their fellow citizens. And it makes those citizens feel powerless.

Note especially the parenthetical note in the first quoted paragraph: "Do our leaders even know what's in our nature?" Do they know who we are and what we're going through?

Meanwhile, in Spain, First Lady Michelle Obama is on a third-of-a-million-dollar vacation:

And her critics will be further annoyed when they learn that the president's wife had a Spanish beach closed off today so that she, her daughter and their entourage could go for a swim.

Spanish police cleared off a stretch of beach at the Villa Padierna Hotel in Marbella after the Obamas had finished a busy day of sightseeing.

This following the recent vacation to Main and the pending vacation in the Gulf region. In the latter, the beaches are closed for the less intriguing spectacle of oil contamination. (And locally, of course, we've had shark sightings closing our beaches.)

Folks are starting to liken Michelle to Mary Antoinette. At the same time, her husband, the President, has flown halfway across the country for a home-town birthday.

By the way, employment is down, and the federal government's solution is to spend billions of dollars to insulate public sector unions... again. Noonan is right to warn of a dangerous environment bubbling.

The Kids'll Respond to Good Points and Respect

One wonders how the side of the culture war that proclaims itself "pro-science" will adjust its thinking in response to this finding (emphasis added):

The participants' mean age was 12.2 years; 53.5% were girls; and 84.4% were still enrolled at 24 months. Abstinence-only intervention reduced sexual initiation (risk ratio [RR], 0.67; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.48-0.96). The model-estimated probability of ever having sexual intercourse by the 24-month follow-up was 33.5% in the abstinence-only intervention and 48.5% in the control group. Fewer abstinence-only intervention participants (20.6%) than control participants (29.0%) reported having coitus in the previous 3 months during the follow-up period (RR, 0.94; 95% CI, 0.90-0.99). Abstinence-only intervention did not affect condom use. The 8-hour (RR, 0.96; 95% CI, 0.92-1.00) and 12-hour comprehensive (RR, 0.95; 95% CI, 0.91-0.99) interventions reduced reports of having multiple partners compared with the control group. No other differences between interventions and controls were significant.

Having followed this sort of research over the past decade, I'll confirm that this result really isn't surprising. Only a smokescreen of spin and obfuscation makes it seem so. Abstinence-only education teaches children to think of sex in terms that should lead them to have less of it. "Comprehensive" sex education teaches them how to have sex. Moreover, it has nowhere been the case that abstinence represents the sum total of the lessons that children receive.

As Joseph Bottum puts it:

While the study emphasized that the abstinence-only classes "would not be moralistic," there was an underlying assumption in those classes that the children themselves were moral beings—a striking difference between the abstinence-only and safe sex–only interventions. In the abstinence-only program, it was emphasized that "abstinence can foster attainment of future goals." In contrast, the safe sex–only intervention concentrated on education about sexually transmitted diseases and condom use—that is, it focused on the present only. The first program assumed that children look forward, anticipate, and hope. The second assumed that, like the lowest animals, they are aware only of the here and now.

Conservatives — especially religious conservatives — tend to believe that treating children as moral beings who can rise above their lusts is a worthwhile practice, even if it has no measurable effect on their present behavior. That the other side is loath to acknowledge that it does have a measurable effect suggests that they, for some reason, prefer that children learn to indulge their basest instincts, perhaps because it makes them riper for dependency.

The Arts Should Be Conservative

Sara Hamdan laments, in the current First Things, the decline of dance as an art form. Given the sustained conditioning required of dancers — and the sustained attention of the audience — the art form doesn't lend itself as easily as other arts to modern adaptations that allow practitioners to maintain the practice as a hobby and fans to work enjoyment into their schedules. Time and money are the irreducible factors, and the dance world is finding it difficult to move enough of each to dancers to sustain a career.

Of course, there are the limited, intriguing developments, such as this variation on the modern trend of do-it-yourself mandates:

With arts organizations trying to focus their energies on redefining market strategies to attract younger audiences and make use of minimal funding, dancers themselves are directly affected. Tired of waiting for good news, Claire Sargenti and Lauren Zaleta took matters into their own hands. With two other Joffrey dancers, they started a ballet collaborative called New Bridges Ballet designed to put on low-budget shows in places where one wouldn’t expect to see ballet: in bars, in Washington Square Park, in a music video for a heavy-metal band. ...

... Sargenti, Zaleta, and two other Joffrey students are doing experimental work with New Bridges Ballet for added training and exposure, and have been very well received. Together, the girls are learning how to fund raise, design costumes, advertise, choreograph new works—and make mistakes—completely on their own. Basically, they are learning how to run a dance company from the ground up.

It's the dance version of self publishing — of blogging, from a certain perspective. Unfortunately, the other predictable reaction to changes in modern life is to excise those factors that require long attention spans:

... popular forms of dance performance have become more about competition and moves and less about narrative or story—like sports set to music. Television programs such as "So You Think You Can Dance" demonstrate that "successful" dancers are those who can display physical talent; these shows do not showcase dance works based on profound observations or that express something beyond the merely physical.

Having watched an episode or several of "So You Think You Can Dance," I'd rejoin that the show's choreographers do give admirable thought to message and story, but they're dealing in bite-sized segments that must, yes, showcase the physically spectacular. Obviously, "physically spectacular" has layers of implication, including the raw bodies of the dancers, and it seems that they move a little closer to total nakedness every season.

That factor, to me, relates more directly to the essential problem than does the reliance on daring leaps and spins. Partly owing to the gimmickry of modernism, partly owing to the pervasive secular, libertine leftism of their practitioners, the arts in general have moved away from their core value proposition: meaning. In some respects, one could suggest that artists — having turned away from their bases for profundity, not only God, but also a respect and sympathy for the long-developing traditions of humankind — have sought to supplant message with technique. But divested of the religious impulse, audiences won't sit through a two-hour ballet for the same reason they don't sit through a forty-five-minute Mass.

If they want jolts of "wow," they can get it in small, convenient doses on television and the computer. If they want opportunity for lurid ogling of taut bodies, they no longer require the cover provided by dancers in leotards.

So, it would be plausible to suggest that the keepers of dance, specifically, and art, generally, should begin to consider a move toward conservative dispositions. For their survival, the time is past due to push the envelope back in the other direction — where the meaning lies in wanting to be tantalized but not sated and in actually believing that sensations of awe and yearning are not merely biological instincts honed by human evolution, but indications of the natural draw of something real and profound.

Teaching While Catholic

There may be more to the story, but it appears that University of Illinois Adjunct Associate Professor of Religious Studies Kenneth Howell has lost his job for the offense of teaching Catholic thought as if it might be worth considering as something more than a curious human error.

Kenneth Howell was told after the spring semester ended that he would no longer be teaching in the UI's Department of Religion. The decision came after a student complained about a discussion of homosexuality in the class in which Howell taught that the Catholic Church believes homosexual acts are morally wrong. ...

One of his lectures in the introductory class on Catholicism focuses on the application of natural law theory to a social issue. In early May, Howell wrote a lengthy e-mail to his students, in preparation for an exam, in which he discusses how the theory of utilitarianism and natural law theory would judge the morality of homosexual acts.

That 1,500-word email clearly stays on the explanatory side of the line from advocacy, getting into trouble mainly at the end, at which point, Howell makes the mistake of suggesting that Catholic teachings are not small-minded gobbledygook, but the rational conclusions of long consideration and must be responded to with the same:

Natural Moral Theory says that if we are to have healthy sexual lives, we must return to a connection between procreation and sex. Why? Because that is what is REAL. It is based on human sexual anatomy and physiology. Human sexuality is inherently unitive and procreative. If we encourage sexual relations that violate this basic meaning, we will end up denying something essential about our humanity, about our feminine and masculine nature.

I know this doesn't answer all the questions in many of your minds. All I ask as your teacher is that you approach these questions as a thinking adult. That implies questioning what you have heard around you. Unless you have done extensive research into homosexuality and are cognizant of the history of moral thought, you are not ready to make judgments about moral truth in this matter. All I encourage is to make informed decisions. As a final note, a perceptive reader will have noticed that none of what I have said here or in class depends upon religion. Catholics don't arrive at their moral conclusions based on their religion. They do so based on a thorough understanding of natural reality.

This was too much for a student who had "a friend" in Professor Howell's class, who made it clear in his email to the head of the religion department, Robert McKim, copied to LGBT activists and a journalist, that he finds it offensive to be told that knowledge and learning should precede judgment:

Anyways, my friend informed me that things got especially provocative when discussing homosexuality. He sent me the following e-mail, which I believe you will agree is downright absurd once you read it.

I am in no way a gay rights activist, but allowing this hate speech at a public university is entirely unacceptable. It sickens me to know that hard-working Illinoisans are funding the salary of a man who does nothing but try to indoctrinate students and perpetuate stereotypes. Once again, this is a public university and should thus have no religious affiliation. Teaching a student about the tenets of a religion is one thing. Declaring that homosexual acts violate the natural laws of man is another. The courses at this institution should be geared to contribute to the public discourse and promote independent thought; not limit one's worldview and ostracize people of a certain sexual orientation.

In actuality, Howell's position was funded by "the Institute of Catholic Thought, part of St. John's Catholic Newman Center on campus and the Catholic Diocese of Peoria," but even if that were not the case, Howell's firing — if based on this complaint, or even a string of such complaints — is evidence of a profound anti-intellectualism that conservatives believe pervades American higher education. Whether "homosexual acts violate the natural laws of man" is a matter of debate, and if it is the case that Catholic philosophy's centuries of development have arrived at such erroneous conclusions that undergraduate students who aren't even studying them can declare them "downright absurd," then that debate ought to be handily won.

Instead, "inclusivity" has trumped intellect:

In another e-mail, Ann Mester, associate dean for the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, wrote that she believes "the e-mails sent by Dr. Howell violate university standards of inclusivity, which would then entitle us to have him discontinue his teaching arrangement with us."

A frightening phrase, that: "entitle us to have him discontinue his teaching arrangement with us." Beware your students, believing Christians. You may find yourself privileged to allow passive-voiced administrators to avoid uncomfortable ideas.

"Religious" Varieties, Ideology and the Man in the Mirror

Alexis Madrigal at the Atlantic has written a piece that uses the latest Apple iPhone problems as a jumping off point to examine the "religious experience" of being an Apple "fanboy." In short, there are 4 myths surrounding the Apple "mystique", according to Texas A&M's Heidi Campbell:

1. a creation myth highlighting the counter-cultural origin and emergence of the Apple Mac as a transformative moment;
2. a hero myth presenting the Mac and its founder Jobs as saving its users from the corporate domination of the PC world;
3. a satanic myth that presents Bill Gates as the enemy of Mac loyalists;
4. and, finally, a resurrection myth of Jobs returning to save the failing company...

Heidi Campbell, for one, doesn't think the company has much to worry about.

"This resurrection myth, and the belief in the infallibility of Mac technologies is going to keep people still invested," Thompson said.

Recalling the pricing and availability problems following the launch of the original iPhone, she concluded, "Antennagate will make waves for a little while, but if what happened to Apple around the launch of the original iPhone and all that rigmarole didn't shake people's faith, I don't think this will."

[A]s illustrated in this (hilarious) video that's garnered 5.5 million views on YouTube, it is hard to shake the faith of iPhone buyer that they are purchasing the world's best device.

"What the hell entices you about the iPhone 4, if you don't mind me asking?" an imaginary store clerk says. "It is an iPhone," the cartoon customer response. "You do realize that doesn't mean anything. It's a brand," the clerk responds, but to no avail.

But that's just it: the iPhone does mean something, and it's the type of meaning that transcends rational optimizing about features and raw performance. "Apple weathered the storm because there is such brand loyalty through the religious narrative," Campbell maintained. "When you're buying into Mac, you're buying into an ideology. You're buying into a community."

That's why both political parties are always garner around 33% support. Or why, once people cast their vote for someone, they are willing to give the benefit of the doubt--often well-past the point that they elected official should continue to accrue such benefits--before changing our mind. It's why sports fans cheer for a team, feel betrayed, but come back on the bandwagon when the franchise is "resurrected" (guilty). It's why people can be let down by a company's product--like a stupid phone--but still sing hosannahs when things get fixed (kinda)--because they've wrapped their identity up in being an "Apple person" and it would be an ego, perhaps even id-, crushing experience to lose that.

I'm not sure if they are components of this ideological/religious explanation for brand loyalty (no matter the "product") or if they are distinct from it, but I think part of this loyalty can be ascribed to a couple, very human, tendencies--one having to do with the heart, and the other with the head. Once our hearts are given, we don't want to deal with being betrayed. No one wants a break-up! We also like to think we're intelligent people with good judgment: and when that judgment proves poor, we don't want to admit we were w-w-w-w-wrong.

That's why, I think, we so often witness people (including ourselves) who--once we're proponents of a way of thinking or a product--are unable to admit when "mistakes were made" or we misjudged something; or that we've simply changed our minds or were convinced otherwise. Instead, too many of the newly unconverted say we were lied to or there was some sort of conspiracy going on that we didn't know about.

We react kinda like a spurned lover and take self-righteous umbrage against our betrayers. Anything to keep the finger of culpability pointing away from us and our own judgment. Many of us are too fragile, I guess. But it's not our fault...

Making Room for Protection

When I taught computer classes in a Catholic school, some years ago, my lunch hour reading habits periodically snagged me inexplicably in the system's Internet filter. The most unexpectedly blocked site was that of a Catholic writer caught up, perhaps, by hostile Web sites that linked to him or comments that he didn't delete quickly enough. Some filters keep lists. I've read about some that take into consideration the number of skin-tone pixels that a site presents to the screen.

Jonah Goldberg and Nick Schuz propose a child-safety system that would begin to change the way the Internet operates:

Right now, there are many "top-level domains" — .com, .org, .biz, .gov, .edu., etc. We propose the creation of a .kids domain that would be strictly reserved for material appropriate for minors 18 years and under. Most sites would probably be able to mirror themselves on a .kids domain with little to no extra effort. Most corporations, schools, and other organizations have perfectly harmless material that kids and teens can view without causing their parents to stay up at night. The sites of the Smithsonian, McDonald’s, Disney, PBS, and countless other institutions are already perfectly safe for minors. Other websites would need a little tweaking, but not much. Only a relative handful of them — porn, dating services, adult-themed chat rooms, R-rated movie sites, et al. — would be explicitly barred from the .kids domain. The others would simply have to tone down or pare down their offerings.

Top-level domains currently don't serve much purpose but to confuse visitors to who don't know which to type. The .gov domain makes some sense, in that visitors can at least trust that the site is government operated (for whatever that's worth), but .com and .org don't really tell one much about the site. Beginning to segment the Internet into communities does make sense and would require minimal additional effort on the part of administrators of small sites, unless they've got content that would have to be targeted to specific audiences.

Of course, from a parent's point of view, I've found that the only real option is to hover around when the kids are on the Internet. It can be a hassle, but parents have a responsibility to keep track of the inputs forming their children. Tools toward that end can help, and knowing that a a .kids filter is in place in a daycare or school would be a comfort, but there's no substitute for presence, on multiple levels.

Boys and Men — Goodbye to All That

Mark Steyn's talking about social engineering in the classroom (subscription required), but the method that he's highlighting — the elimination of individual friendship — broadens quickly:

... much of the contemporary scene owes its origins to silly little fads among "educators" that seemed too laughable to credit only the day before yesterday. I see the Times piece references those literary best friends of yore, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. But Tom and Huck's boyhood is all but incomprehensible to today's children. I believe that unlike its fellow Missouri educational establishment in St. Louis, the grade school in St. Petersburg had no "director of counseling," because, if it had, she would have diagnosed Tom with ADHD and pumped him full of Ritalin, and the story would have been over before he'd been told to whitewash the fence. The suppression of boyhood would have been thought absurd half a century back. Yet the "educators" pulled it off, effortlessly. Why not try something even more ambitious? ...

Give me a boy till seventh grade, say today's educators, and we can eliminate the man problem entirely.

By "the man problem," Steyn means the intractability of fully formed and independent adults; any Tea Party mom will will tell you that fully expressed womanhood is on the engineers' suspect list, as well. Nonetheless, the males of our species are under particular scrutiny.

Which brings us to Mark Patinkin:

It was Atlantic Monthly. It had a cover story that did not bode well for my gender. It was titled, "The End of Men." The thesis is that we are becoming secondary in society. Our record of running things for the last millennium or so is coming to a clear end.

I at first thought it would be a feminist screed. Perhaps it was. Unfortunately, it was also convincing.

Here are two facts that say it all. (1) As of this year, women make up most of the U.S. workforce. (2) Three of five college graduates are women.

Patinkin and his source note the transformation of our economy from industrial to service, but "services" are of such a variety that, in general, the industry needn't be gender specific. One would expect more parity than sublimation were that the key factor. The next possibility that he mentions is that young men are to blame, citing an anecdote from the Atlantic piece:

Here's one from Ashley Burress, student-body president of the University of Missouri at Kansas City, who's getting a Ph.D. in pharmacy. The article sums up her view of the genders on campus this way: "Guys high-five each other when they get a C, while girls beat themselves up over a B-minus. Guys play video games in each other's rooms, while girls crowd the study hall."

Anybody who's either applauded, lamented, mocked, or passively noted male competitiveness should see immediately that the motivation to excel is not a gendered phenomenon. It's a cultural phenomenon, and on first blush, it looks as if we're turning the world into every boy's dream: Women, on top of being more man-like in their sexual adventurousness, are chasing career paths. The young men can hook up at parties, play games all day, and as the cultural pressure eases on them (1) to get married, and (2) to be the breadwinner, they may begin to expect their wives to take care of them when their parents no longer will. There's a Tom Sawyer cleverness to playing while others work.

But it can't last. The more men feel at ease as leeches, relying on their significant others to supply whatever adult variation of Ritalin they prefer, the less use they'll be. The less attractive they'll be. When professional women fulfill that natural urge to give birth (assuming they maintain that urge), it will make more sense for them to pair up with other professional women for the purpose of parenting. As it happens, our society is charging toward equation of such relationships with traditional marriage.

UPDATED: Charity and Accosting the Public

I've been meaning to bring up a letter critical of Alan Shawn Feinstein that Tim Castelli submitted to the Providence Journal not as an exercise in piling on, but because it does raise some interesting questions about charity and the drive to be a public figure:

... "You're from Rhode Island and you don't know who I am?" the stranger pressed.

The little annoying voice did start to sound familiar to my wife, but she replied she was sorry she didn't recognize him. "Well, I am Alan Shawn Feinstein," the stranger replied.

After asking my children where they attended school, he went into his "good deeds" speech and told my children that "they should help people and do good things." He should really listen to his own advice.

My 10-year-old daughter answered his questions and was very respectful, as she always is. My 8-year-old son said "hi," and then wanted nothing more than to continue observing the animals. After Mr. Feinstein's self-indulging speech, he gave my daughter his "Feinstein Junior Scholar" card and told her it was because she was a "good listener and answered all my questions. But your brother, he's not listening or paying attention, so he's not going to get a card."

I'm sure I'm not alone in having thought the ubiquity of Mr. Feinstein's face in local schools and those periodic three-generations-of-Feinsteins commercials to be a little... oddly self promotional. But the reality is that, in our current culture, people who are hugely generous will also tend to be a bit eccentric, and while some ethical systems (notably, Christianity) emphasize humble giving, it can't be denied that public recognition is powerful motivation for charity.

So, yeah, perhaps Mr. Feinstein should be a bit less forward when approaching families enjoying the day together in public, and it might have made a nice cap to his message if he'd — I don't know — given a card to the boy's mother with the instructions to get him to do a good deed, something small, to earn it. But as Feinstein told reporter Jennifer Levitz in a 2004 profile (that certainly illustrates his eccentricity): "You can be the nicest guy in the world and there will still be a certain percentage of people who won't like it for one reason or another."

ADDENDUM:

Feinstein has a letter in the paper today, in which he raises some good explanations for visible giving:

Over 2 million people every year donate to anti-hunger agencies in response to the Feinstein challenge. I couldn't have achieved that anonymously. Nor could I anonymously fund the many local charities that depend on me every year for regular monthly grants.

Besides, anonymous giving is not always as good as it sounds. Unfortunately, it is used by some people of means as a way to give less money to charity than expected of them. Ask any fund raiser. Moreover, anonymous giving is not much of a motivator to others. If your friends don't know the good you do, it can't motivate them to follow suit.

Rhode Islanders might suggest that these points don't quite cover the extent of Feinstein's visibility, but as I said, one should expect philanthropists to be eccentric and to appear to have underlying motives.

One other point, from the letter, that I'd guessed from Mr. Castelli's (in which he noted that the zoo had told him that they'd ended their official relationship with Feinstein):

As for our association with the Roger Williams Park Zoo, so many free admissions were coming into the zoo when it was on our Jr. Scholar card that the zoo asked to be released from its contract with me.

Little wonder that's the case, when youngsters can acquire the cards simply by paying attention to a strange rich guy for a few minutes. Perhaps the threshold for a "good deed" — which the cards are meant to reward — should be a bit higher.

Time Traveling in Their Minds

Scientist priest Rev. Tadeusz Pacholczyk explains that a recent scientific achievement in the news was not so much the creation of life as a rebuilding of a fundamental component, citing a Princeton microbiologist:

"Every cell is a microcosm of life, and neither the Venter team nor anybody else has come close to recreating the cell from scratch. If anything, the new report underscores how dependent biologists remain on its encapsulated power. Bonnie L. Bassler, a microbiologist at Princeton, said, "They started with a known genome, a set of genes that nature had given us, and they had to put their genome into a live cell with all the complex goo and ingredients to make the thing go."

What's interesting about some responses, though, is the authors' eagerness to dispel that which one can assume they've already managed to disprove to their own satisfaction:

Nevertheless, a number of commentators have managed to miss the point. Bioethicist Art Caplan, writing on the Scientific American website, suggests that Venter's "synthetic cell" dispels the notion that life "is sacred, special, ineffable and beyond human understanding."

Faye Flam muses in a similar vein in the Philadelphia Inquirer: "What's shocking about the new organism isn't that it breaches a boundary between inanimate matter and life, but that it shows that no such boundary exists. Life is chemistry." Her article gets even more outlandish when she suggests that chemicals "have the power to assemble themselves into organisms -- even complicated ones that can contemplate their own place in the universe..."

You know, I don't know that I've ever heard anybody claim that scientists could not possible learn to build cells from scratch. There are plenty of reasons to worry about the quest to do so — philosophically and practically — but the probability that it could be done is not seriously in dispute. No doubt, the likes of Caplan and Flam have long expected that day to come and have already drawn their conclusions about material and spiritual life.

It's an odd thing, that in acknowledging miracles and mysteries, religious people tend not to be concerned about mankind's peeks into the machine, while those who seek to make a religion of disbelief often seem desperate to declare the matter proven, even as they clearly believe that it already has been.

Permissible Discrimination

Following up on a story that I mentioned a month ago:

An ideologically split Supreme Court ruled Monday that a law school can legally deny recognition to a Christian student group that won't let gays join, with one justice saying that the First Amendment does not require a public university to validate or support the group's "discriminatory practices."

The court turned away an appeal from the Christian Legal Society, which sued to get funding and recognition from the University of California's Hastings College of the Law. The CLS requires that voting members sign a statement of faith and regards "unrepentant participation in or advocacy of a sexually immoral lifestyle" as being inconsistent with that faith.

As with tax exemptions and the like, my preference is for religious and other groups to remain free of the government's (or university's) financial thumb. Still, one suspects that this policy will not be (is probably not being) universally applied in an objective way — along the reasoning that it's not discrimination to discriminate against those who discriminate in ways that the dominant culture doesn't like. One also suspects, however, that few Christians and other cultural conservatives will be inclined to test the ruling's application by striving to infiltrate and undermine the principles of liberally minded student groups, as appears to have been an issue in the other direction in the case at hand.

That might make for an interesting project, though, for politically conservative students: Join a radical environmental group in large numbers, claim its offices, and reverse its statements of finding and principle. Such dishonest subversion isn't something that I'd encourage, but it sure would be entertaining to watch as a spectator.

The Odd Twists of Guilt

Mark Steyn proposes an interesting turnabout:

... As paradoxical as it sounds, Muslims have been far greater beneficiaries of Holocaust guilt than the Jews. In a nutshell, the Holocaust enabled the Islamization of Europe. Without post-war guilt, and the revulsion against nationalism, and the embrace of multiculturalism and mass immigration, the Continent would never have entertained for a moment the construction of mosques from Dublin to Dusseldorf and the accommodation of Muslim sensitivities on everything from British nursing uniforms to Brussels police doughnut consumption during Ramadan. Holocaust guilt is a cornerstone of the Muslim Europe arising before our eyes. The only minority that can't leverage the Shoah these days is the actual target. It is disheartening to see Elie Wiesel, in Toronto the other day, calling for Holocaust denial to be made a crime throughout the world (as it already is in many European countries). He so doesn't get it. The greater risk to Jews is not that the world will "forget" the murder of 6 million people but that it has appropriated the crime for its own purposes. In Europe, the ever more extravagant Holocaust Memorial Day observances have taken on the character of America's gay-pride parades with their endlessly proliferating subcategories of celebrants. As Anthony Lipmann, the son of an Auschwitz survivor, wrote in The Spectator five years ago: "When on 27 January I take my mother's arm — tattoo number A-25466 — I will think not just of the crematoria and the cattle trucks but of Darfur, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Jenin, Fallujah."

One could note that the Holocaust wasn't the only moral crime contributing to social guilt and the multiculturalist mindset, which Islamofascists — while feeling no guilt about their treatment of Jews, women, homosexuals, Christians, and any other subjugable groups — leverage to self-present as an oppressed minority. In the United States, slavery and segregation are the hinge pin.

In a sense, Western Civilization has been in a sort of cultural Purgatory. Having awoken to some of the evils in which we've participated — although they are by no means unique to us — we are shocked into a crisis of confidence. Not surprisingly, our own demons and those from outside see an opportunity to seize while we're locked in an unhealthy vanity of repentance. The challenge is to learn from the past rather than wallowing right back into it.

Earning Happiness

The behavior of both sides of the liberal-guilt–welfare axis might find some explanation in this line, drawn from a review of Arthur Brooks's The Battle: How the Fight Between Free Enterprise and Big Government Will Shape America's Future by Matthew Continetti (subscription required):

It is not inequality, Brooks writes, that makes people unhappy. It is a lack of self-worth. It is the feeling that success is unearned.

On the welfare-recipient side, Continetti notes:

In 2001, the University of Michigan's Panel Study of Income Dynamics noticed a correlation between welfare dependency and sadness. The panel found that going on the dole increased the chances of feeling "inconsolably sad" by 16 percent. "Welfare recipients," Brooks writes, "are far unhappier than equally poor people who do not get welfare checks." And while Brooks is quick to point out that correlation is not causation, the data certainly suggest that welfare doesn't make you any happier.

On the guilty liberal side, one thinks of the simplified explanation that Rush Limbaugh (gasp!) frequently offers: they know that they're wealthy beyond their merits, so they assume the system that so blessed them must be unjust. Rather than returning their "unearned" rewards, though, they seek to take a smaller amount from everybody — regardless of desert — in order to give to those who have "unearned" and not received.

Move beyond — if you can — the previous paragraph's poke at our pals on the left and focus on Brooks's point, which he states thus, in a 2007 City Journal article:

What I found was that economic inequality doesn't frustrate Americans at all. It is, rather, the perceived lack of economic opportunity that makes us unhappy. To focus our policies on inequality, instead of opportunity, is to make a grave error—one that will worsen the very problem we seek to solve and make us generally unhappier to boot.

Pointing out that income inequality in the United States has been expanding because "the rich are getting richer faster than the poor are getting richer," Brooks highlights the astonishing fact that, for some who rail against inequality, discouraging work among the successful is actually a feature, not a bug, of income redistribution:

According to British economist Richard Layard, "If we make taxes commensurate to the damage that an individual does to others when he earns more"—the damage to others' happiness, that is—"then he will only work harder if there is a true net benefit to society as a whole. It is efficient to discourage work effort that makes society worse off." Work, according to this postmodern argument—contrary to millennia of moral teaching—is no different from a destructive vice like tobacco, which governments sometimes tax in order to discourage people from smoking.

We who are productive, but not yet successful, might wish to interject that making gobs of money typically involves enabling other people to make or save money, too. As we've discussed on Anchor Rising before, replacing the rich folks who run WalMart with an army of mom 'n' pops would eliminate the employment of the large company's relatively well-compensated employees and disallow people of the same economic class from economizing in the way that WalMart's retail model allows.

Unsurprisingly, the difference in perspective ultimately seems to come down to whether one views society as a collection of castes or of individuals. The left sees those who work for WalMart as People Who Work for Walmart and, implicitly, always will. The right sees them as people who currently see WalMart as offering the greatest opportunity given their current circumstances. The poster representative for the former view is the single mother grasping about for any means of supporting her family; the poster representative for the latter view is the young adult making some side cash while learning the benefits of a strong work ethic and developing workplace interpersonal skills.

By way of a disclaimer: these distinctions are false. The single mother is just as apt to see "check out clerk" as a stepping stone, and the young adult may just as likely max out his potential stocking shelves. The point is that one side of the political divide presents current occupation as demonstrated maximum potential without public assistance, while the other side leaves potential up to the individual to demonstrate. (Shades of this difference can also be seen in union lamentations that teachers don't make as much money as others with the same amount of education. The problem is that individuals who go on to higher-paying gigs — say, quarter-million-dollar education commissioner — no longer appear in the "teacher" category.)

As Brooks and Continetti also explain, the effect of attempts to eliminate income inequality don't increase happiness. Because perceived opportunity is the greater contributor to that emotion, their policies actually have the opposite effect. We can take this assessment a step forward if we look to an underlying consequence of the mindset, whether it's conscious or not: The left's policies make government the provider of opportunity. To the extent that the right believes opportunity is provided (rather than seized from amidst the flow of uncontrollable natural and social forces), its policies put the responsibility in the hands of individuals.

Poetry of Life's Underlying Politics

I really do like that some political and religious periodicals publish poetry, but I have to admit that I'm seldom impressed. Skeptic of modernity that I am, the profundity passes me by. Something about rhyme and meter in poetry... well... it works.

I think (often) of Robert Frost's "Provide, Provide." Those who worry that fealty to structure tends toward the trite might have a point, in that poem, midway through the rhyming triplets, yet it's reasonable to credit that very structure — the necessity of certain words in a certain order in a certain rhythm — with the blend of humor, profundity, and especially memorize-ability of the final lines:

No memory of having starred
Atones for later disregard,
Or keeps the end from being hard.

Better to go down dignified
With boughten friendship at your side
Than none at all. Provide, provide!

I offer this commentary, though, in the course of noting an exception. Daniel Mark Epstein's "Grandfather's Spectacles" in a recent National Review (subscription required) struck me strongly, with this as its beginning:

He was not a brawler, or vain,
But came up in a time and class
Where a youth of exceptional beauty
Had to prove himself — man to man — Time and again. ...

The subject turns out to require glasses and, after a day spent marveling at the world when seen clearly, must prove himself, man to man, against the sneer of "frog-eyes." He who must prove toughness because handsome must thereafter defend the distortion of his looks. The victim of the world's incoherent violence, of course, is "the miraculous invention of wire and glass," and fortitude in the face of brute human nature comes at "the cost of clear vision."

There's no shortage of factors to blame for the evaporating weight of poetry, which music composer Robert Schumann once declared to be the highest art. But I'm inclined to place at the forefront of culpability the loosening of the rules. As Mr. Frost once said, "poetry without rhyme is like tennis without a net."

Civic Engagement Should Be Part of Life

It may seem an odd adjective to use in describing a person in such an establishment role as the Providence Journal's Commentary page editor, but in writing and conversation Robert Whitcomb is an iconoclastic figure. His take on the reason for dissipating civic engagement among the young, in the United States, highlights the characteristic.

Whitcomb's essay is brief, and he points his fingers in a variety of directions, so one-paragraph quotation would capture its sense, so read the whole thing. Having done so, perhaps you'll agree that the tilt of his proposed solutions misses something that his complaints stroll right around. For example:

Colleges and universities can encourage more civic engagement by offering more political-science and other social-science courses that explain how students can use their citizenship to more effect. Student internships and academic leaves at public-policy think tanks and media outlets should be encouraged. Political-science departments and journalism schools can help facilitate these arrangements.

Such an approach — while I certainly wouldn't advise against it — will tend to play into the specialization of interests that contributes to the problem in the first place. That is to say that it makes civic participation akin to a career option, when what a democracy needs is for it to be a constituent activity of life itself. Earlier, Whitcomb suggests that high schools' imposition of community service might cast it as a requirement from which college sets them free; why, then, would colleges want to present political science in a similar light?

To broaden that notion: What's needed, I'd suggest, is a return to general learning and cultivation of intellectual interest, which is much more difficult than siphoning some segment of student and young adult populations into an area of study and activity. Societywide, we have to begin rewarding action and discouraging passivity — encouraging exploration of problems and development of solutions on an individual basis and trusting that public action will prove sufficiently interesting to draw attention.

Unfortunately — and most definitely not surprisingly — those who currently inhabit the realms of politics and culture-making have reason to prefer begin left to their topical fiefdoms. Much better for the masses to become lost in the passivity of television, narcissism of social media online, and canned causes to assuage guilt than for everybody to have an opinion formed from personal conviction and tied to a learned habit of putting thought into action.

Government as Lone Shark Collector

I've written, periodically, about my belief that debt is the new method of indentured servitude. If we can get young adults to enter the working world with hundreds of thousands of dollars in education loans, some additional thousands in credit card debt (incurred on the expectation of profitable labor after graduation), with car loans a near necessity, and housing options pushing them toward entering into mortgages, we've taken away a great deal of the freedom that economic independence imparts. The situation gets chilling if this story is anything more than journalistic sensationalism of a few peculiar cases:

It's not a crime to owe money, and debtors prisons were abolished in the United States in the 19th century. But people are routinely being thrown in jail for failing to pay debts.

In Minnesota, which has some of the most creditor-friendly laws in the country, the use of arrest warrants against debtors has jumped 60 percent over the past four years, with 845 cases in 2009, a Star Tribune analysis of state court data has found.

Not every warrant results in an arrest, but in Minnesota many debtors spend up to 48 hours in cells with criminals. Consumer attorneys say such arrests are increasing in many states, including Arkansas, Arizona and Washington, driven by a bad economy, high consumer debt and a growing industry that buys bad debts and employs every means available to collect.

Whether a debtor is locked up depends largely on where the person lives, because enforcement is inconsistent from state to state, and even county to county.

In Illinois and southwest Indiana, some judges jail debtors for missing court-ordered debt payments. In extreme cases, people stay in jail until they raise a minimum payment. In January, a judge sentenced a Kenney, Ill., man "to indefinite incarceration" until he came up with $300 toward a lumber yard debt.

I expect we'll see this trend expand as the federal government takes on more responsibility in the finance sector, including the bailing out of too-big-to-fail banks. The reality that every loan shark has always known is that some debts cannot be collected. That's the risk of lending. If the government begins stepping in to jail those who fall behind, the public is taking the role of the crooked-nosed debt collector banging on the door and the balance of risk and benefit that makes lending a healthy application of free will and mutual benefit begins to evaporate.

Who to Blame for the Social Fabric

Because he italicized it on a list of one-liners, I couldn't help but catch the following from Providence Journal columnist Bob Kerr:

The damage Wal-Mart has done to the social fabric, to the downtown connections and sense of community, is incalculable.

Blaming WalMart for the deterioration of downtowns is merely an indication of the human urge to find some group to hate. Given advances in technology, the ubiquity of automobiles, and other cultural factors, an opportunity existed for a large chain of one-stop shops, and the specific company WalMart happened to catch the wave. Had there been no WalMart, there would have been Target, a reinvigorated K-Mart, or the elevation of some other regional chain that most of us have never heard of.

More importantly, to my mind, in providing necessities cheaply and reducing the cost of luxuries, WalMart has made it possible for less well-off Americans to save money on their weekly expenses and to enjoy items that they couldn't possibly afford were the prices not driven down by the same dynamics that have priced downtown shops out of their storefronts.

I do not like the effects on communities — or, to be sure, on the culture at large — but I wouldn't presume to tell my countrymen that they must do without items that WalMart makes affordable so that the likes of Bob Kerr can buy them in small local shops. If there's blame to be laid — and that's a sincere "if" — it must ultimately fall on the people of the United States for the culture in which WalMart, like shopping malls and all of the other consumerist villains, thrives.

Facing Up to Porn

A line from Mary Eberstadt's recent summary of sociological research about pornography includes this telling observation:

Several experts have also noted one more interesting phenomenon that most people who have ever written on this thankless subject will verify: Telling the truth about pornography is practically guaranteed to elicit malice and venom unique in their potency from its defenders.

Citing some extreme examples of the backlash, Eberstadt counts it as evidence of addiction, and a particular desire to believe that it's not a problem. That's surely part of it, but I think pornography is also at a fault line of American political philosophies.

Libertarians, no doubt, would begin to bristle (as, I confess, I did) at the suggestion that First Lady Michelle Obama should take up an anti-porn campaign when she completes her efforts against obesity. Government involvement quickly raises the stench of prohibition, and it's easy to foresee things going horribly wrong on this particular issue.

On the other hand, libertarians are far too quick, in my opinion, to treat every movement against individual liberties — especially those having to do with sex — as if it is government oppression. The can be a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, in that, as it becomes left to those who don't so much fear the use of government force to address real social problems.

Such quotations as this ride the aforementioned fault line:

Yet with all due respect to the social science, not everyone needs it to know that pornography is more than just a private thing. Imagine your teenage daughter walking down the beach. Half the men on it have been watching sex on the Internet within the last few days, and half have not. Which ones do you want watching her? How can their "private" behavior possibly be said to be confined to home, when their same eyes with which they view it travel along with them everywhere else?

I certainly see Eberstadt's point, and I've made similar arguments about individuals' associations before. (It's bound to affect a man's treatment of a woman whom he's just met if she reminds him of some porn actress rather than, say, a saint in a classic painting.) But questioning the "privacy" of one's own thoughts begins to move toward dangerous ground.

My concern is that, if protectors of liberty push back whenever problems such as pornography are so much a mentioned, then they won't have much leverage should society decide that the problem must be addressed.

Perhaps Those Who Ought to Know Better Oughtn't

The relevance of education came up in an interesting conversation that National Review's Jay Nordlinger had with a Tunisian immigrant in Texas:

The driver was recently back in Tunisia. And a curious incident occurred, in the town. A horse reared up and injured somebody (not badly). The owner subdued the horse as quickly as he could. Later, a mob came and beat the owner up, as punishment. "My sister said, 'Good, he deserved it.' And she is a doctor, a psychologist. If she thinks this way — that a mob can just do what it wants — what about common people?" ...

... I know what he means when he talks about his sister and the common people. Shortly after 9/11 — maybe on 9/11, I can't remember — a doctor acquaintance in Alexandria e-mailed me. She said, "I know you live in New York, and I hope you're okay. And please know that Muslims could not have done this." She murmured about the Jews. I thought, "If she can think this — a doctor who lectures at the University of Alexandria — what hope does her janitor have? What about the man selling lemons on the street?"

I once might have assented to this generality, but having worked in such "common people" occupations as unloading fishing boats and construction for most of my adult life, I'm increasingly inclined to question it. While they may be less familiar with the specifics of current events, I've found that, when informed, salt-of-the-earth folks are more likely to translate them in terms of everyday experience. In other words, they don't often think about politics and culture, as such, but when they do, they rely on common sense.

The highly educated, on the other hand, habituated to the white-collar-professional world have learned as fundamental truths:

1. That there is untold information in society of which they can only know a fraction.
2. That specialists (which includes many such professionals) often know things that just don't make sense to non-specialists.

Both findings are accurate, productive, and necessary to a fully aware and intricate social structure, but they lose their relevance when it comes to matters of principle and politics. There are no specialists in determining how justice ought to be defined, and seeking specialists to follow in such areas merely stains non-rational preferences with the tint of objectivity. More likely, though, the assumption will be that there must be specialized knowledge behind the received wisdom of the seeker's clique, and that assumption recasts preferences and biases not simply as the way things are, but as the way it's been determined that they ought to be.

Such tendencies are broadly human. What I'm proposing, here, is that the habits of thinking and acquiring social status might actually make the individual more susceptible to the error.

Discrimination with Regard to Discrimination

Hadley Arkes examines the Supreme Court case Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, which is addressing the question of whether the Hastings Law School of the University of California in San Francisco can refuse to recognize a student group for Christians that excludes anybody with "unrepentant participation in or advocacy of a sexually immoral lifestyle." The controversy arose, predictably, because the group counts, as one such proscribed lifestyle, active homosexuality and advocacy thereof.

In order to validate its revocation of the group's official recognition in such a way as to appear not to be engaging in invidious discrimination, itself, the university defined its policy such that any recognized group must accept any participants, even those with antipathetic beliefs. "To a questioner not quite believing, Dean Leo Martinez confirmed that a chapter of the Jewish Anti-Defamation League would have to admit Muslims, and a gathering of black students would have to admit Ku Klux Klan members and, presumably, skinheads." More: the university proclaimed that ill-fitting members must be eligible for leadership positions.

Thus, if they were disposed toward an oppressive lark, a group in the campus majority — say, far-left liberals — could join, take over, and entirely subvert the message and activities of a campus minority — say, traditionalist Christians.

The point that I wish to raise comes up with the judges' attempt to understand how distinctions could be made between unacceptable discrimination and discrimination that remains permissible as the expression of truly held beliefs:

[Lawyer Michael] McConnell said that of course those kinds of racist groups could be barred because they were founded on discriminations based on "status," not belief. Presumably he meant that the wrong in discrimination based on race and sex inhered in drawing adverse moral inferences about people as though race or sex actually controlled or determined their character. But the distinction between "status" and "belief" did not explain itself, and so Justice John Paul Stevens chimed in: What if a group was simply founded on an earnest "belief" in the inferiority of black people and the superiority of whites? Justice Anthony Kennedy was tempted to give a certain standing to claims of "belief" as a ground of association that could claim a certain standing to be respected, mainly because the beliefs were held. Earnestly held, that is, and not to be tested by any indecorous probing into their truth.

The question pressed by Sotomayor can be answered only by explaining why a moral discrimination based on race would be wrong in all instances, whereas discrimination based on "sexual orientation" simply could not claim the same standing. For one thing, the moral discriminations based on race or sex worked by making moral predictions about the conduct or the moral worth of people based solely on their race or sex. But the groups defined by homosexual acts or "sexual orientations" are marked as groups precisely by the acts they commit. People are described as "arsonists," for example, when they commit arson, and the recoil from arsonists is a recoil from the crime of arson.

The problem here is that any activity we could name could be directed to a hurtful or wrongful end. Sexual acts, whether heterosexual or homosexual, can be deployed as assaults to injure and degrade. Some people may be "oriented" to rape, or to sadomasochism or bestiality. Even gay and lesbian activists will argue over the question of whether they regard members of the Man-Boy Love Association as standing legitimately in their circle, with a "sexual orientation" they respect.

McConnell (and Arkes) head in the rhetorical direction of when exclusion should be allowed, but one can reach the same point by stating when it should not be. Employing the distinction between "status" and "belief," one could argue that a white supremacist group would have to be recognized if it would not bar a black man who believed in his own inferiority. That this is absurd — and the group could be reasonably rejected for that reason — does not prove that it is equally absurd to hypothesize about people with homosexual inclinations who believe their desires to be wrong; it proves that race and sexual orientation are substantively different.

As Arkes explains, discrimination based on race assumes an inferiority of the person on the basis of his or her ethnicity. It is a statement of superiority without any possibility of dispositive proof of individual equality. In the case of sexuality, the individual is not presumed to be less deserving of standing and respect as a human being. He or she is considered to be in error on a particular matter, but questions of essential worth and character are available for him or her to answer positively or negatively, to impress or to disappoint, in equal measure to those whose sexual lives conform with traditionalist standards.

When political correctness undermines our ability to make such distinctions, we lose the ability to devise objective rules that tolerate those with whom we disagree. Everything, that is to say, comes down to expressions of power — whether the university administrator is empowered to impose his or her own views as the measure of discrimination, or students in an active majority can subvert and suppress the organized expression of contrary views.

Proving Sex Ed Policies a Failure

One hears, from time to time, that abstinence only sex education has been proven to be a failure.
Not only is the proof arguably incorrect, but the entire premise misses the mark. Abstinence education hardly enjoyed meager implementation, let alone the pervasive reinforcement that would be necessary for society-wide effect.

But I do wonder what those who continue to offer the common complaint that a small devotion to abstinence in the broad sphere of public school sex ed didn't change anything would say about this:

The United Kingdom’s Daily Telegraph has an article this morning documenting the high rate of repeat abortions among young girls in Great Britain. According to the article, 89 girls aged 17 or under who terminated a pregnancy last year had had at least two abortions previously. Furthermore, 2009 figures from the Department of Health indicate that for the first time, more than a third (34 percent) of abortions were performed on women who had already ended one or more pregnancies.

While these statistics are tragic, the article unfortunately fails to link these outcomes to Britain's permissive policies with regard to abortion, contraception, and sex education. For instance, England has no parental-consent requirement. In both 1982 and 2006 the courts ruled that minor girls can obtain abortions without their parental permission. These high rates of repeat abortions provide good evidence that effective parental-involvement laws might be able to prevent minors from obtaining multiple abortions by providing parents with an early indication of their child's sexual activity.

Abortion isn't the only indicator that "comprehensive" sex ed, British-style, has failed to resolve or has in fact made worse. But it's such an article of faith that all we have to do is teach children how to have sex safely that few stop to notice that the operative clause in that belief is "teach children how to have sex."

The Guardian's Conspicuous Armor

A recent column by John Derbyshire was more entertaining than usual. I say that, in part, because I greatly sympathize with his suspicion of the medical arts — although I've never calculated out the risks entailed with various tests as compared with the risk of not taking them.

But what's really lodged in my imagination is the summary of a short story with which he opens the piece:

Science fiction writer Robert Sheckley wrote a story titled "Protection" whose first-person protagonist acquires a guardian angel. The angel is actually a validusian derg — an invisible, immaterial being from another plane of existence, present only as a voice in one's head. The derg's sole satisfaction is to keep a human being safe from harm.

Like all pacts with the supernatural, this one turns out to have a downside. By taking on the derg, our narrator has made himself conspicuous to that other realm. Dangers multiply. The derg explains:

"If you accept protection, you must accept the drawbacks of protection ..."

"Are you trying to tell me," I said, very slowly, "that my risks have increased because of your help?"

"It was unavoidable," he sighed.

In a practical sense, one can observe that accepting protection inherently entails choosing a side, making the protector's conflicts one's own, so it's a subject for Derbyshire's calculation of risks. But there's also an element of tempting fate.

A client asked me, the other day, whether I'm an optimist, a pessimist, or a realist. I replied that I believe that good things are bound to happen... but only to other people. It's probably pessimism to be looking for the other shoe, when things are going well, and to expect exacerbation when things are going badly — although the individual can certainly plea realism, given particular experiences. When it comes to tempting fate, however, one might as well take the route of conspicuity; if doom is inevitable, the more interesting and dramatic path thereto is surely preferable.

Which brings in the underlying optimism, I suppose, that in the end, we're just gathering anecdotes to share in Heaven (one hopes)

Evolution Away from Threats, Versus Toward Desires

Bradley Watson's essay, "Darwin's Constitution," is worth reading in its entirety (subscription required), but this paragraph points toward the problem with the notion that society is evolving in a progressive direction:

Dewey's elucidation of the new modes of social inquiry drew upon the thought of a number of Social Darwinist and pragmatist thinkers, including William Graham Sumner, Lester Frank Ward, William James, and W. E. B. Du Bois. These thinkers provided the intellectual categories of their age, and today those categories continue to exert a powerful influence over political — and jurisprudential — discourse. Collectively, they point to a view of society as an organism that is constantly in the throes of change and must adapt or die. Like the Social Darwinists, the pragmatists used naturalistic concepts and emphasized change, while rejecting what James called the "rationalist temper" that ossifies rather than adapts. For the Social Darwinists and pragmatists, looking backward — as Lincoln had done — to founding principles, or to any other fixed standard of political practice, inevitably hinders the process of adaptation.

As one observes in other contexts, what progressives are doing, in this regard, is smuggling in their brand of faith as if it were a biological imperative. The adaptation that they laud is not toward survival, not even really toward ease and comfort, but mainly to their concept of what society should be.

In Darwin, a species doesn't grow or lose a limb because it finds itself thus inclined. Rather, it develops inclinations (and limbs) in response to natural stimuli — sometimes, no doubt, in contravention of other inclinations.

In the context of social Darwinism, the urgings of both nature and God become subsidiary to planners' observation that they can leverage people's desires to advance their own political and ideological goals.

A Quick Review of Avatar

The past week left me feeling like a man trapped in anachronism. My work environment, which is rarely more hospitable than "endurable," seemed transported to a time when "servitude" was a more accurate description than "employment." Physically, it took a week for doctors to find the correct eye drops to battle a progressive eye infection that, by Thursday night, had swollen one eye to a slit and found its way to the other. Until yesterday, the medical miracles we take for granted were less than miraculous, and a traveling doctor might have done just as well by advising a damp cloth for the face and an elixir with high alcohol content.

So, by the time Friday evening arrived like the break of the Twentieth Century, I could motivate myself to be no more productive than was required to prepare a snack before staring at a television screen for several hours. My wife and I watched Avatar.

I'd been forewarned, of course, to let the overt politicization of the film go in the name of simple enjoyment, and while the showing was in process, I was able to do so. But movies ought to be like wines that make a supplementary savor of aftertaste, and once the gush of aesthetic pleasure and emotional balm had passed, what remained of Avatar was bitter indeed.

It's really a shame. I don't give to much away, I don't think, in explaining that the fantasy world of Pandora has coursing through it a sort of electrical current connecting all life on the planet and even retaining memories of the dead as if downloaded into the hardware of an organic computer. In other words, Director James Cameron had plenty of room to explore the parallels between computer science and physics, with the intriguing questions about God that thereby arise. He even could have pushed a heavy-handed environmentalism, on those grounds, without interfering with the appeal of the story.

That wasn't, apparently, enough.

A scene from the 1996 Independence Day came to mind repeatedly. In that movie, a psychic link between a captured alien and President Bill Pullman (I believe) reveals that the alien species travels from planet to planet, using up the resources that it finds there and moving on. It doesn't take but a modicum of cultural awareness to realize the insinuation that humankind bears some resemblance, in that respect. However, it's just a path, perhaps a tendency, of our species, and as the entire world comes together, with cooperation between corporate types, military forces, and average folk joining forces against the common foe, Independence Day leaves the viewer with the feeling that, when it comes down to it, people will turn toward goodness.

That wasn't good enough for Cameron. Almost in a direct reference to the earlier movie, the protagonist of Avatar, a human being whose consciousness has temporarily been transferred to a man-made alien body (the "avatar"), warns the native creatures that humanity used up every last bit of green on its native Earth and will do the same on Pandora. In other words, not only are the human beings who've traveled across the universe for a precious mineral evil, but their entire species is evil by its nature.

The message that humankind should resist those qualities that could fester into parasitical behavior has given way to the assertion that humankind is, in fact, a parasite, with only the rare dork, woman, minority, and cripple able to find redemption.

It seems to me that, in making such decisions, Cameron has turned his craft from the very possibility of creating art that seeks universal truth, because the film explicitly disclaims our specie's interest therein.

The Failure of Enron (the Play)

Reading the Sunday ProJo, I noticed the weird picture of a normal looking business-type guy smiling alongside a couple others dressed in suits, but with dinosaur heads. The picture accompanied a piece explaining how the London theatre crowd was aghast that American audiences just didn't get the London hit play Enron. Basically, according to the article, cultured Brits thought us ugly Americans were to stupid and unsophisticated to get the humor.

In London, the show has been a runaway hit since opening last January in the West End after a sold-out run at the Royal Court.

Here in New York, "Enron" didn't receive a single major Tony nomination other than best score--and it's not even a musical!

"Since 9/11 the insular Americans have become terribly sensitive to criticism," Jerry de Groot wrote in the Telegraph. "They don't mind when Jon Stewart dumps bucketloads of heavy-handed political satire on the 'Daily Show,' but they get tetchy when the criticism is delivered with an English accent."

Michael Billington, the critic of the U.K.'s Guardian, suggested Americans were just too stupid to appreciate a satire requiring a sense of history and a modest understanding of accounting legerdemain.

"If 'Enron's' melancholy saga proves anything," Billington wrote, "it is Broadway's irrelevance to serious theatre."

The play's instant 9/11 simulation is like a sucker punch for which New York theatergoers had no fair warning. Oddly, none of the critics I've read mentioned the scene, though Brantley devoted a strange passage to "the design team keep[ing] the stage pulsing with flashing colors [and] rainstorms of sparks (and later, ashes)."

Even today, video replays of 9/11 can induce a physical reaction in New Yorkers. On the night that I attended the play, in previews, two people seated in the rows ahead of me left during the scene. Many viewers likely paid little attention to the final scenes of the play.

If Goold did not notice his audience's visceral response to the previews, he's an incompetent director. During the play's first half, the audience and the actors interacted easily. Theatergoers were generous with their laughter, applause, and attention, and they were patient with the story. At intermission, the audience chatted comfortably. But shortly into the second act, along comes 9/11, and shocked audience members launched a quiet but seething strike. Funny scenes were met with frosty silence. At the end, the audience offered only tepid applause, though Butz's performance, certainly, merited a standing ovation. The white-faced crowd headed silently for the exits.

It's likely that Enron would still be running on Broadway if Goold had heard what his audience was trying to tell him. No New Yorker would subject his friends, relatives, or neighbors to this. Goold either didn't get the message, or he chose not to compromise his creativity, such as it is. As a result, New Yorkers rejected Enron. And that, you might say, is how markets work.

Nothing to See Here, Locally and Globally

Well, we got beat at the Tiverton financial town meeting. Liveblog here, and post-game here. Tiverton's tax levy will now go up a minimum of 7.88% in the middle of the worst economy in a century, with house values plummeting, businesses closing, and for sale signs loitering for months on end on front lawns around town. Too many people stand to gain by taxing others for the upward climb of taxes to take a break for such things as unemployment and the expansion of the working poor.

But I'm going to get out of my now-more-expensive basement office and go spend some family time in the fresh air. In the meantime, I leave you with a laugh-out-loud good line from Mark Steyn:

At Ford Hood, Major Hasan jumped on a table and gunned down his comrades while screaming "Allahu Akbar!" — which is Arabic for "Nothing to see here" and an early indicator of pre-post-traumatic stress disorder.

If you're merely in the mood for levity, don't click the link and read beyond that sentence. Suffice to say that I associate the growing government in Tiverton, Rhode Island, and the United States with the weakness of the West that Steyn sees on a global scale.

Where the West Is Going

It's a much broader topic than I've time to explore, just now, to say why I see these apparently small-scale local battles to be along the same line as global events, but by way of checking in on the state of Western civilization, here's Mark Steyn:

A while back, Wilders was asked what his party would do in its first days in office after winning the election (to be held later this year). He replied that it would pass a bill ending "non-western immigration" to the Netherlands. This remark is now one of the "crimes" listed on the indictment against him. So the Dutch state is explicitly prosecuting the political platform of the most popular opposition party in the country. Which is the sort of thing we used to associate with your average banana-republic caudillo rather than free societies.

Regulation of speech — regulation in general — is shaping up to be the method by which unaccountable bureaucrats gain power over the elected representatives who are actually supposed to run the show. To oversimplify the resulting situation: Those bureaucrats benefit when the society sees itself as weak and in need of stable, government control, but in any sense related to authority and resolve, the bureaucrats, themselves, are weak and will ultimately be displaced by those who do not share the good intentions that they attribute to themselves.

How the Accommodating Institution Declines

Apparently, in fields that debate such things, there's been an attempt to apply economic principles to explain the ebbs and flows of attendance in different churches. John Lamont does some difference splitting and paints a persuasive picture (subscription required). Because "the rewards of religion are supernatural and, therefore, unseen," the healthy religion, he explains, requires a different form of evidence, which is more visible where it is more distinctive:

Zeal and commitment are also necessary to lessen the "free rider" problem that plagues all voluntary groups — the problem of members who take the benefits of membership without contributing themselves. One can add to these considerations the fact that much of the appeal of religion comes from its providing moral principles with which to structure one's life. Such principles are far more effective when one sees that most of the people around one are following them. A community of people who, by and large, follow the principles of a morally demanding religion is far more effective moral educator than any amount of preaching — a factor that is especially important for parents. Thus, a church has to set high standards for membership in order to be attractive, and the churches that set high standards are the churches that will grow. Those with low standards will shrink because low standards reduce the rewards for religious commitment below the required cost in time and effort. This is why, as Finke and Stark assert, "the churching of America was accomplished by aggressive churches committed to vivid otherworldliness."

The problem arises with each incremental argument that this or that rule is arbitrary and may be discarded, often with the ultimately erroneous expectation that the church might be more attractive if its costs were lower. Lamont quotes from The Churching of America, 1776–2005: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy, by Roger Finke and Rodney Stark:

... other things being equal, people will always be in favor of a modest reduction in their costs. In this fashion, humans begin to bargain with their churches for lower tension and fewer sacrifices. They usually succeed, both because it is those with the most influence — the clergy and the leading laity — who most desire to lower the level of sacrifice and because each reduction seems so small and engenders widespread approval.

This perspective applies, to some degree, to cultural matters, as well. With marriage, for example, a great many people who formed their fundamental understanding of the institution long ago don't see why an easing of divorce, here, and the erasure of gender rules, there, ought to have any effect on their own marriages. As the rules ease, though, and boundaries of the institution become less clear, those who are not already formed in their perspectives have less reason to follow the well-trodden path.

The benefits to the individual spouse are, as with religion, supernatural, but they're also social and cultural. (Of course, the benefits to children born into stable marital homes are quite tangible.) If people don't draw the satisfaction of feeling a part of something greater, upon which participants agree — that is, if an institution merely provides a title for something that each participant defines for him or herself — the calculated rewards for forming relationships that are insoluble even when difficult or for devoting time and energy to religious practices even when disruptive become more and more difficult to reconcile.

The Misdirected Swagger of the Go Getter

John Derbyshire posted a viral email from Wall Street circles that amounts to an egotist's cri de coeur:

Go ahead and continue to take us down, but you're only going to hurt yourselves. What's going to happen when we can't find jobs on the Street anymore? Guess what: We're going to take yours. We get up at 5am & work till 10pm or later. We're used to not getting up to pee when we have a position. We don't take an hour or more for a lunch break. We don't demand a union. We don't retire at 50 with a pension. We eat what we kill, and when the only thing left to eat is on your dinner plates, we'll eat that.

For years teachers and other unionized labor have had us fooled. We were too busy working to notice. Do you really think that we are incapable of teaching 3rd graders and doing landscaping? We're going to take your cushy jobs with tenure and 4 months off a year and whine just like you that we are so-o-o-o underpaid for building the youth of America. Say goodbye to your overtime and double time and a half. I'll be hitting grounders to the high school baseball team for $5k extra a summer, thank you very much.

So now that we're going to be making $85k a year without upside, Joe Mainstreet is going to have his revenge, right? Wrong! Guess what: we're going to stop buying the new 80k car, we aren't going to leave the 35 percent tip at our business dinners anymore. No more free rides on our backs. We're going to landscape our own back yards, wash our cars with a garden hose in our driveways. Our money was your money. You spent it. When our money dries up, so does yours.

One encounters this sort of swagger from people who have been successful in their careers, especially (it seems) when those careers have something to do with manipulating money. Because the content begins and ends in bellicosity, internal inconsistencies are to be expected. Note that the writer declares the inevitability of finance types' overtaking other professionals because they don't mind working hard, but then insists that they'll work as little as he claims the incumbents do.

The more essential problem with the rant is that it makes the dubious assumption not only that finance is the toughest industry in the universe, but also that it is a sort of ubercareer of which all others are pale imitations. I'd suggest, as an example, that the same drive that the writer professes mightn't serve him so well in the attempt to draw eight year olds along a path toward learning. Careers are substantively different in ways that a certain kind of smarts and ambition can't always surpass, and different people are suited to them.

As for the insinuation that finance professionals are the core consumers of the American retail and service market, I can only testify that, of all the middle-to-high-end construction projects on which I've worked, I'm not sure a single one was has been for the Wall Street set. That's a roll of the dice, to be sure, but the point is that other professionals make money, too, for actually doing, you know, stuff. Stuff that creates things and accomplishes objectives other than rolling money around.

Insider and Outsider "A" Students

As a matriculated "A" student, now a carpenter, I'm not sure I can accept P.J. O'Rourke's thesis:

America has made the mistake of letting the A student run things. It was A students who briefly took over the business world during the period of derivatives, credit swaps, and collateralized debt obligations. We're still reeling from the effects. This is why good businessmen have always adhered to the maxim: "A students work for B students." Or, as a businessman friend of mine put it, "B students work for C students—A students teach."...

Why are A students so hateful? I'm sure up at Harvard, over at the New York Times, and inside the White House they think we just envy their smarts. Maybe we are resentful clods gawking with bitter incomprehension at the intellectual magnificence of our betters. If so, why are our betters spending so much time nervously insisting that they're smarter than Sarah Palin and the Tea Party movement? ...

The other objection to A students is what it takes to become one—toad-eating. A students must do what teachers and textbooks want and do it the way teachers and texts want it done. Neatness counts! A students are very busy.

At the very least, O'Rourke ought to draw a distinction between variants of the "A" student, between those who agree with their professors and those who do not. I used to write twenty to eighty page papers (many of those consisting of footnotes) when the argument that I felt intellectually obliged to make clearly conflicted with the preferences of the person doing the grading. Sort of the academic variation of the electoral maxim, "if it isn't close, they can't cheat."

Just such a paper could be written, it seems to me, on the link between political philosophy and my proposed categories of "A" students. Those who achieve high grades in spite of their status as class gadfly are not apt to prefer governments that presume to stand before and instruct the electorate on the definition of a good life and equitable distribution of resources, while those whose high marks happened to coincide with philosophical accord with the grade giver have likely learned the advantages of having somebody hovering above their peer groups dispensing rewards.

Of course, as you read this, I'm probably crouched over a century-old fir floor board, prying it straight with one hand while pounding screw-flooring nails into its tongue with the other. If only I had the time to work that into a proper metaphor...

Daily Show with Jon Stuart's Take on the Threats and Censorship Surrounding those South Park Episodes

... is superb. If you're time constrained, fast forward to minute 8:25. ("Revolution Muslim", referenced in the screen cap below, is the name of the organization/website which posted the threats to the show's producers.)

A Glimpse Down the Social Path (or, Perhaps, Sociopath)

Inch by inch. What's controversial today is commonplace tomorrow, as the forces of so-called progress poke, prod, and pry our civilization apart. Feel free to use the comment section to accuse me of exaggeration and doom-crying; people respond thus with every turn of the ratchet:

Parents' organizations in Spain are fiercely protesting the curriculum of the Socialist government's required education course, "Education for the Citizenry," after it was revealed that in one Spanish city, students are being taught that sex can be freely practiced, even with animals.

According to the organization "Professionals for Ethics," third grade students in Cordoba, located in the southern Spanish region of Andalusia, are using course material stating that "nature has given us sex so we can use it with another girl, with a boy or with an animal." Parents groups say the material indoctrinates children and camouflages an agenda that is pro-homosexual and critical of moral norms and values.

Zealots Never Sleep

Think what you will of the outcome, it's astonishing — and not a little unsettling — that there are people who think it the most important use of their time and resources to battle the benign and vapid symbolism of a particular "national day of":

A federal judge in Wisconsin ruled the National Day of Prayer unconstitutional Thursday, saying the day amounts to a call for religious action.

U.S. District Judge Barbara Crabb wrote that the government can no more enact laws supporting a day of prayer than it can encourage citizens to fast during Ramadan, attend a synagogue or practice magic. ...

Congress established the day in 1952 and in 1988 set the first Thursday in May as the day for presidents to issue proclamations asking Americans to pray. The Freedom From Religion Foundation, a Madison-based group of atheists and agnostics, filed a lawsuit against the federal government in 2008 arguing the day violated the separation of church and state.

Even casting my mind back to my own, sometimes obnoxious, atheism, I can't imagine the sort of zealotry that must spur people to organize in opposition to a generic call to prayer. Of course, organizational dynamics probably play some role — with the actual foundation soliciting limited funds from a broad number of people and then having to contrive action items to prove that it's worth the donation (which, one imagines, the donors see mainly as a thumb in the eye of us fundies).

Paranoia, it's the American Way

As Rich Lowry explains in his latest column, we Americans are perpetually paranoid about our government, whether it's the liberal paranoia throughout the Bush years (Patriot Act, world hegemony) or the right wing paranoia amongst conservatives in the Clinton years (Waco, domestic anti-terrorist laws post-Oklahoma City). Lowry explains that our paranoid view of government has been in our "DNA" since the Founding (and before).

As Bernard Bailyn demonstrates in his classic, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, our forebears prized the thought of the 18th-century “country” opposition in England, which considered the government a clear and present danger to liberty — corrupt, conspiratorial, and insatiable.

America’s leaders viewed Revolutionary events through this prism. “They saw about them,” Bailyn writes, “not merely mistaken, or even evil, policies violating the principles upon which freedom rested, but what appeared to be evidence of nothing less than a deliberate assault launched surreptitiously by plotters against liberty, both in England and in America.”

This is the taproot of American paranoia. It’s not in status anxiety, or economic dispossession, or racism: It’s in flat-out distrust of governmental authority. As the Patriot Act shows, in America even the statists can summon a robust fear of government. And would we have it any other way? Would we prefer the natural deference to authority of a Japan, or a political culture as favorable to central government as Russia’s?

The First Step of Abstinence Is Believing It's Possible

For some reason, the irresistible nature of sex has come up in various forums and offline conversations. Frankly, my own youth stands as evidence, but placing my experiences in review, I'm not so sure that it had to be so. Had I met anybody like Sarah Hinlicky, writing here in 1998, I'd have likely scoffed, but that would clearly have been my loss:

Okay, I'll admit it: I am twenty-two years old and still a virgin. Not for lack of opportunity, my vanity hastens to add. Had I ever felt unduly burdened by my unfashionable innocence, I could have found someone to attend to the problem. But I never did. Our mainstream culture tells me that some oppressive force must be the cause of my late-in-life virginity, maybe an inordinate fear of men or God or getting caught. Perhaps it's right, since I can pinpoint a number of influences that have persuaded me to remain a virgin. My mother taught me that self-respect requires self-control, and my father taught me to demand the same from men. I'm enough of a country bumpkin to suspect that contraceptives might not be enough to prevent an unwanted pregnancy or disease, and I think that abortion is killing a baby. I buy into all that Christian doctrine of law and promise, which means that the stuffy old commandments are still binding on my conscience. And I'm even naive enough to believe in permanent, exclusive, divinely ordained love between a man and a woman, a love so valuable that it motivates me to keep my legs tightly crossed in the most tempting of situations.

Sex is the sort of subject on which folks feel a need to sound worldly when it comes up, which skews the way we talk about it. But I'll tell you this: It simply isn't the case that everybody's secretly full of lust and deception.

The Believing Modern

Given the day, and the surprising amount of interest displayed, 'round here, in conversation of religion's clash with modernity and postmodernity, current editor Joseph Bottum's first publication in First Things, back in 1994, merits some consideration:

We were all of us raised as moderns, however, and even as I write these words, my own modernness rises up to make me blush. To speak about doom and retribution, about the godless present age, is to sound distinctly premodern, distinctly dated, distinctly benighted and reactionary. It is to sound like the anti-humanistic enemy against whom modernity has campaigned for three hundred years. And I ought to blush, for I profit fully from the modern. I drive my car, keep iced tea in my refrigerator, get my vaccinations, use my computer, turn on my air conditioner in the summer heat. ...

I choose the phrase "to hold knowledge" deliberately, for the massive scientific advance of modernity reveals how easy it is to discover facts, and modernity's collapse reveals how hard it is to hold knowledge. We have an apparatus for discovery unrivaled by the ages, yet every new fact means less than the previously discovered one, for we lack what turns facts to knowledge: the information of what the facts are for. ...

Three hundred years of this attack [on ancient faith] have created in believers an attitude both deeply defensive and deeply conservative. But the defensiveness springs from the attempt by believers to defend their belief against a "progressive" philosophy that is already rejected intellectually by nearly all cultural commentators, and, I suspect, despised intuitively by nearly all young people in America. Believers should not become entangled in the defense of modern times. This is the key—the postmodern attack on modernity is right: without God, essences are the will to power. Without God, every attempt to call something true or beautiful or good is actually an attempt to compel other people to agree.

It's an interesting point. The modern person of traditionalist faith agrees with the Enlightenment modernist that reality has a coherence, a narrative, but also agrees with the post-modernist that the removal of God from the plot leaves only the arbitrary intentions of power-hungry animals.

Given some of the topical matters that we've been discussing, such as drugs and sex, I'd been thinking how clear it is that secular leftists support freedoms that make the individual vulnerable, but revile freedoms that allow the individual to shore up his influence or to develop firm self-contained communities. The druggie must be free, for example, to numb his sense of reality with drugs, but the businessman must not be free to determine that druggies impede the efficiency of his company. Conveniently, we can observe, those who express their freedom in self-destructive ways require a third-party guarantor — the state — to whom they must allocate power.

I'd also been thinking that those who decry inequity of class as a call to arms invariably disclaim the existence of a God and a larger purpose — a larger personal existence — such that the have nots can only be bitter that they've drawn short straws for their measly few decades of life, while others live as kings and queens. There are essentially two ways to battle those circumstances: Again, allocate power to some champion (the state) that will take from the rich and give to the poor, or redefine meaning and the successful life in a way that the bullies and leeches cannot touch. Indeed, the stronger their assault, the greater the reward.

The sorts of people who seek power for themselves by stoking grievance in others cannot stick their strings into such a worldview, which makes it dangerous. And so it is. Those vested in the power of earthly days can only be threatened by the promise of resurrection and the strong confidence of immortal souls.

The World Has a Story

Given comment section conversation, and the fact that it's Good Friday, a Robert Jensen piece from 1993 seems an appropriate item for contemplation:

... modernity has supposed we inhabit what I will call a "narratable world." Modernity has supposed that the world "out there" is such that stories can be told that are true to it. And modernity has supposed that the reason narratives can be true to the world is that the world somehow "has" its own true story, antecedent to, and enabling of, the stories we tell about ourselves in it. ...

If there is little mystery about where the West got its faith in a narratable world, neither is there much mystery about how the West has lost this faith. The entire project of the Enlightenment was to maintain realist faith while declaring disallegiance from the God who was that faith's object. The story the Bible tells is asserted to be the story of God with His creatures; that is, it is both assumed and explicitly asserted that there is a true story about the universe because there is a universal novelist/historian. Modernity was defined by the attempt to live in a universal story without a universal storyteller.

Even before I ceased to call myself an atheist, I had a sense that secular Western society was trying to smuggle the fruits of religious tradition without the responsibilities. The practice is visible on an individual basis, too, in people who developed their sense of reality, and their basic comfort with life, within a religious context, but who decided that they (and their children) no longer needed to keep up with even the tepid demands of religion. The repercussions, it seems to me, take at least a generation to manifest, and I suspect the near future will bring either a return, among the young, to traditionalist faith or a rapid, astonishing deterioration of our society.

What's Ailin' the Moderns

David Lewis Stokes gave some consideration to the work of sociologist Philip Rieff, who died in 2006. Not being familiar with Rieff's work, I can't say how much Stokes has added or subtracted, but this strikes me as profoundly insightful:

In antiquity the ideal of what it was to be truly human was to become either hero or sage. In the Middle Ages it was to become a saint. In our own time the best we can hope to become is — well-adjusted. But without the backdrop of a sacred order and in a culture predicated on gratification, self-fulfillment and well-adjustment remain malleable terms, in constant need of redefinition. ...

... The nature of our therapeutic climate is such that instead of reaching an ideological dead end, it simply reinvents itself to explain why its dead end is not a dead-end at all. Simply put, therapeutic technique has become an ever-expanding maze without a center.

Progressives see it as an ever-expanding definition of liberty (somehow always entailing more pervasive power for government agents). I see it as a back-filling prevarication, forever redefining consequences and detriments as simply the next order of complications to be resolved. Only our unprecedented technological and economic advancement, over the past few centuries, has allowed this illusion to obtain, and that advancement has been built on the very cultural foundations that progressives seek to disassemble.

Violent Sexists Support Legalized Prostitution?

It would be wrong, of course, to tar everybody who might consider the legalization of prostitution to be a positive development, but an advocate for the other side, Melanie Shapiro, raised a relevant point in Ed Achorn's recent column on violent online imagery directed against Shapiro and her fellow activist Donna Hughes:

"I think it is unfortunate that they have resorted to such low-level comments, but I am really concerned about the women in the brothels who have to encounter men like these. It shows you what kind of men they have to face," Ms. Shapiro said.

However much people — mainly progressives — wish to present prostitution as empowering of women, their customer base will largely consist of lowlifes who have no problem seeing them as objects. At least now, it's no longer a transaction that the state considers to be legitimate.

The Dangling President

Let's order things clearly: It was objectionable for a Central Falls high school teacher to dangle an Obama doll upside down with a sign saying "Fire CF Teachers," because it involved the students in a union dispute. Talk of its being a hate crime is utterly outlandish:

To Clifford Montiero, president of the Providence branch of the NAACP, the effigy represents a lynching of a black man, and brings back painful memories of decades of injustices.

"In my mind, this is a hate crime, and the teacher should be charged," Montiero said. "This teacher feels he can demean the president of the United States, an African-American who has overcome all this hatred. It is wrong. And when you take a nonviolent environment like a classroom, and introduce violence and hatred into it, you have crossed the line."

Even calling the thing an "effigy," as the Providence Journal does, goes a bit far. I look at the picture and I think Laugh In, not Mississippi Burning, with the President popping out to offer a one liner.

An Eroding Moral Code

Kevin Hassett expresses the interesting concern that a second wave of financial crisis may be in our future if homeowners (or, rather, home mortgagers) decide simply to walk away from houses on which they owe more than their worth. All losses would thereby transfer to banks' bottom lines, eliminating more of the future wealth that is currently flowing through the current economy.

The essay's worth reading on those grounds, alone, but here's an intriguing bit of evidence about the mechanics of morality:

And there was an interesting twist: Of the students who had the chance to cheat, half were asked beforehand to list ten books that they remembered read­ing in high school, while the rest were asked to write down as many of the Ten Commandments as they could remember.

The results were stunning. On average, students in the control group answered 3.1 problems correctly. Students in the second group took the opportunity to cheat--under certain conditions: The ones who started by listing ten books from high school cheated, on average reporting that they had answered 4.1 problems correctly. The students who were asked to recall the Ten Com­mandments, by contrast, did not cheat, reporting on average 3.0 correct an­swers.

Apparently, thinking about the Ten Commandments put students in a moral frame of mind.

Pink Floyd, Conservative Band

Perhaps it's the onset of spring. Perhaps the previous post, on libraries, lowered my "lighter note" inhibitions, but the time feels opportune to raise a topic that's been kicking around the corridors of my mind since Jay Nordlinger referred to a conservative's knowledge of and affinity for Pink Floyd. Three points come to mind:

1. Conservatives like form and a balance of artistry with aesthetics. As perhaps the archetypal band for concept albums, Pink Floyd hearkened back to longer-form art-music genres with the aesthetic of pop/rock music. (Society forgets that Schubert's Die Winterreise [e.g.] was once pop music; precisely a "concept album" in different terms.) The band's Atom Heart Mother, for example, makes many of the same maneuvers as may be heard on the 20th century samples on a survey of Western music (such as comes with the Norton Scores), but without abandoning the principle that it ought to be enjoyable to listen to.
2. Conservatives are frequently converts from something else. Depending on the setting, I'll be either ashamed or nostalgic to admit that experience enables me to discuss the best... moods in which to listen to different Pink Floyd albums, and I'm surely not alone among my current social and political compatriots.
3. Perhaps because of the previous two points: Conservatives learn from art, even art with surface messages with which they disagree. Consider Pink Floyd's The Wall: First, one can hardly listen to the music or watch the movie without discerning the anguish of the protagonist and readily identifying its causes (mainly cultural deterioration of family values); indeed, a cycle of causes and effects are what it's all about. Second, as a cultural statement, The Wall offers a window into the society that created it. In a vlog posted a few months ago, I make the point with regard to The Wall that it successfully conveyed the cultural message that Nazi-style fascists would target the usual minority groups and employ a certain message and aesthetic. So thoroughly has our culture received and reconveyed that message that it is extremely unlikely that any looming totalitarians will be of that ilk. Noting this, a conservative will know to look elsewhere (as at the nanny state taking children away from heavyset parents in Scotland), while a liberal will sing along and defend such budding dictators against the protestations of classically liberal modern conservatives who bear a superficial resemblance to the oppressors of popular imagination.

A Conservative Approach to Libraries

For a variety reasons, I've found the reported success of Providence branch libraries to be encouraging. As a writer and reader, I'm obviously invested in the written word. As a tangible spiritualist (if you will), I'm a fan of books, specifically. As a cultural conservative, community involvement is an appealing outcome. And as a libertarian-leaner on governmental and fiscal topics, I can't resist pointing out this:

"It was inspiring to see a group of dedicated volunteers work so hard," says Karen Mellor, library program manager for the state Office of Library and Information Services. "It's also remarkable what they accomplished in a short period of time." ...

With a $5 million budget — about $2.5 million less than what the public library had said it took to run the system — the community library has retained most of the old library staff and kept basic services and hours of operation intact. Years of budget cuts, though, have left the libraries with weak collections and old buildings in need of repair.

The funding is still public, but it's titularly municipal, which is fine by me. Community involvement can include a community decision that a library is worthy of public funds. Whatever the case, I hope the branch libraries succeed in their goal of revitalizing neighborhoods as local hubs.

Oh Canada! For Once, Political Correctness is Stopped Cold

From Reuters.

Don't mess with a century-old tradition even if it is sexist, Canadians told the Conservative government this week, forcing Ottawa to scrap plans to make the country's national anthem gender-neutral.

* * *

For nearly 100 years, the anthem has included the line, "True patriot love in all thy sons' command."

In a major policy speech last week, Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government had proposed referring these lyrics to a committee to review its gender neutrality. But

Complaints from irked citizens poured in to radio and television shows, invoking the sanctity of national symbols and tradition.

When I first read the offending line, I took "sons" to mean all of Canada's progeny, regardless of gender, just as I've always understood "mankind" to mean all members of Homo sapien sapien and so on, down the list of words and terms which are purportedly offensive as they are gender-biased.

However, not everyone in Canada sees it that way.

The opposition Liberals called it a gimmick proving the Conservatives were not serious about women's rights.

Here's an idea: let's judge a country's attitude towards women not by words but by their treatment under law, in politics (in the United States, for example, all parties are eager to have women run for office) and by tradition (i.e., all children regardless of gender having equal standing in an inheritence, unless a will specifies otherwise). It strikes me that the final step to this considerable progress is to celebrate it by entertaining the possibility that genderized words become gender neutral in certain contexts. Including that of a nation's anthem.

The Boys Are Back... for Good

George Will is concerned that real men are a fading gender in our society:

Although [Penn State University History Professor Gary] Cross, an aging academic boomer, was a student leftist, he believes that 1960s radicalism became "a retreat into childish tantrums" symptomatic "of how permissive parents infantilized the boomer generation." And the boomers' children? Consider the television commercials for the restaurant chain called Dave & Buster's, which seems to be, ironically, a Chuck E. Cheese's for adults—a place for young adults, especially men, to drink beer and play electronic games and exemplify youth not as a stage of life but as a perpetual refuge from adulthood.

Personally, I'm hopeful that the back-swing of the cultural pendulum will bring back some of the self-reliance, chivalry, and, well, manliness to modern manhood, without erasing some of the intellectual and emotional gains that represent some necessary softening around the edges. Of course, such an outcome is only possible if people begin to acknoweldge — and talk about — what's been lost.

Which is not to say that it's been thoroughly erased. Some of the old guard are still around, overlapping with the vanguard of a new breed, but I'm talking about a sort of cultural average. There's also a degree to which manliness has persisted as a sort of thematic lore in films and fiction; it's the translation into action, without sinking into senseless violence and abuse, that is wanting.

Privileges on Demand

Yeah, yeah, I know it sounds all right-wing conservative to say, but it's difficult not to fear for the future of our country with this sort of thing in the news:

Students and activists have staged demonstrations in recent months at public colleges across California to protest deep budget cuts that have led to steep tuition hikes, enrollment cuts, faculty furloughs and reduced course offerings.

In Berkeley, about 50 people broke through a fence surrounding Durant Hall, which is closed for renovation, and about 20 entered and occupied the building, said Cpt. Margo Bennett of the UC Police Department.

The group smashed windows, sprayed graffiti, damaged construction equipment, knocked over portable toilets and hung up a banner promoting the March 4 rally, UC officials said. Others blocked police from entering the building.

So they're protesting budget-driven cuts by causing damage that the strained budget will have to cover. Worse, they're protesting something that until very recently was considered a huge privilege.

I can't help but wonder if part of the problem is that grown-up manipulators didn't fully understand the effects on subsequent generations of all of their "rights" talk, with regard to privileges, over the past few decades.

Movie Briefs

While it has it's inaccuracies, The Hurt Locker is a movie I'd heartily recommend. The most impressive parts of the film for me were those depicting the stressful situations the soldiers were in while doing their job, ie; everyday life for a U.S. combatant in Iraq circa 2004.

On a completely different note, I also liked The Fantastic Mr. Fox, a movie based on the book by Roald Dahl. It wasn't a kiddie film by any means. As Ross Douthat put it in his review for National Review (NR subscription req'd).

In Dahl’s book, the foxes and badgers are delighted to live permanently underground, feeding off the farmer’s storehouses, while their enemies wait in vain for them to emerge. In the movie, things are more ambiguous. “I’m a wild animal,” Mr. Fox tells Mrs. Fox (Meryl Streep), explaining why he can’t stop taking risks, and there’s a sense throughout the film that this wildness is imperiled — that the farmers may be defeated, but that the animals will be forced to domesticate themselves in order to survive, living more as parasites on civilization than as the hunters they were meant to be.

Finally, I haven't seen Avatar yet. (If you haven't guessed, I tend to be a little late in my movie viewing habits!) But I did finally see Pocahontas. Ehhhh....sorta-typical Disney pc fare--only mild de-programming of the children required, post-film. But if, as they say, the former is merely the latter with more flash and bang, perhaps I'll pass.

Politically Correct and Unreliable

Have you heard the one about the government employment site that refused to allow discrimination against unreliable employees?

CAMPAIGNERS reacted with anger last night after it was claimed a Jobcentre worker had refused to display an advert for a "reliable worker" because she felt the phrase discriminated against unreliable applicants. ...

The mother of two [who attempted to place the ad], from Borehamwood, Herts, said yesterday: "I placed the advert on the website and when I phoned to check I was told it hadn't been displayed in the Jobcentre itself. The woman said, 'Oh we can’t put that advert on the Jobpoints'.

"She said it was because they could have cases against them for discriminating against unreliable people. I laughed because I thought that was crazy. We supply the NHS with staff so it's very important for the patients that we have reliable workers.

More reasonable heads seem to have prevailed, but the initial impulse speaks volumes about the use of political correctness and threats of litigation for the benefit of the lazy and scheming. It's the subversive manifestation of the same cultural movement leading to riots in Greece and political intimidation on California campuses. Mark Steyn puts it well:

We hard-hearted small-government guys are often damned as selfish types who care nothing for the general welfare. But, as the Greek protests make plain, nothing makes an individual more selfish than the socially equitable communitarianism of big government: Once a chap's enjoying the fruits of government health care, government-paid vacation, government-funded early retirement, and all the rest, he couldn't give a hoot about the general societal interest; he's got his, and to hell with everyone else. People's sense of entitlement endures long after the entitlement has ceased to make sense.

Without a resurgence, this could be the century that Western self-reliance dies.

Everybody Needs a Dad

In a recent column, Julia Steiny ran through various ways in which fathers are, in general, distinguishable from mothers. Here's a sample:

... dads bring other huge contributions. For one thing, they play. That fatherly roughhousing that most kids love actually aids brain development. Play has been proven to enhance learning, and dads usually play with their kids more than moms. This play "promotes confidence in motor skills, courage, risk-taking and autonomy. It puts the kid on the path of healthy development and gives the child strong self-esteem," Glantz said. Even as they're wrestling with one another, the child can feel the love. And, "Dad's love is valuable like nothing else."

What all of the differences come down to, it seems to me, is that a father has unconditional love, like a mother, but without the sense of unity. As Steiny quotes from researcher Tonya Glantz:

"... think of how dads talk. It feels like: 'You are here with me' as opposed to 'You are a part of me.'"

That somewhat different relationship is not only something learned by the experience of being an actual parent, but also something that has been woven into our personalities and culture, in conformance with out biological natures. Whether you want to believe it's purely evolutionary or admit a Maker, fatherhood is expansive in the subtlety of its inherent effects on our society. (Which, of course, ties into the theological discussions that we've had around here, from time to time.)

What I've written above will have broad currency, in our culture, when the topic is education, parental responsibility, social work, and so on. However, much as fatherhood is broader than, say, an economic relationship, the concept of fatherhood and its importance ought to have implications for how we conceive of such things as marriage.

The Sky Is Blue; Sexual Content Encourages Sex

The unfortunate thing is that parents must learn the truth of this through experience.

Authoritative parents also restrict their children's exposure to sexual content in the media (music, television, movies and Internet). It is well documented that exposure to explicit sexual images and lyrics accelerates the onset of sexual debut among adolescents. Authoritative parents will enforce a zero-tolerance drug and alcohol policy, and educate their children about the relationship between substance use impaired judgment and an increased incidence of sexual activity. Authoritative parents know their children's friends, and their children's friends' parents, and work together to monitor social activities.

The scary thing is that there are people who'll dispute some or all of Michelle Cretella's advice.

A Cultural Turnaround Based on Experience

Here's an interesting result from a survey of U.S. Catholics done by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University in Washington, appearing in an article in the Rhode Island Catholic, but not apparently online anywhere:

"The youngest Catholics ... look a lot more like the pre-Vatican II [than the] Vatican II or post-Vatican II cohorts," [social scientist Barbara Dafoe Whitehead] said. "Huge majorities - 80 percent or more - of these youngest Catholics believe that marriage is a lifelong commitment and that people don't take marriage seriously enough when divorce is readilly available."

Many children of this generation have experienced divorce in their own families, and they are determined not to divorce themselves, Whitehead said.

Of course, one should also consider the possibility that increasing liberalism after Vatican II led to fewer Catholics of the sort who would disagree with this young generation and a concentration of traditionalists among those who are still religious (which could be a leaping point for further discussion about the effectiveness at liberalizing doctrine to be more amenable to shifts in cultural mores). Still, it's not difficult to imagine cultural backlash among a generation that's been on the receiving end of negative life-changing trends such as increases in divorce.

What would be the texting jargon for "'til death do us part"?

Unabashed Plug of a Rescuing Providence Post

It didn't make me cry, dammit.

By the way, as Michael will soon be going Hollywood, he needs to begin assembling his entourage.

Let's see. A makeup person, a hair person, a wardrobe consultant. A scheduler and a couple of gophers. An agent, back in a glass-and-chrome office, making rapid fire phone calls and chain smoking European cigarettes. An insider to keep Michael up on the latest LA and NY gossip. And, most importantly, a goodly assortment of Yes Men Persons.

Don't leave this important task to the last minute, Michael ...

The American Difference

Per his usual habits, Mark Steyn makes a significant observation that has gone largely unremarked:

... I've been saying for months that the difference between America and Europe is that, when the global economy nosedived, everywhere from Iceland to Bulgaria mobs took to the streets and besieged Parliament demanding to know why government didn't do more for them. This is the only country in the developed world where a mass movement took to the streets to say we can do just fine if you control-freak statists would just stay the hell out of our lives, and our pockets. You can shove your non-stimulating stimulus, your jobless jobs bill, and your multi-trillion-dollar porkathons. This isn't karaoke. These guys are singing "I’ll do it my way" for real.

In the interest of beginning Sunday on a positive note, I won't quote the subsequent paragraph.

On the Culture of Snow

Matt and I pondered the cultural causes of snow-aversion on the Matt Allen Show, last night. Is it related to global warming (or lack thereof)? Is it related to the Internet and video games? Stream by clicking here, or download it.

I actually think it's a softening of our regional character. We once braved the weather, in the Northeast. We dealt with it. We put the chains on the tires and felt as if we're ready. Now, people have become enamored of the opportunity to run and hide. I suppose, therefore, it's less a matter of diminished bravery against the snow as it is diminished fortitude against the daily grind of life.

The Difference a Pope Makes

In keeping with the theme of confidence as a prerequisite to true tolerance, Joseph Bottum explores the way in which the authority represented by the papacy gives the Roman Catholic Church a theological coherence that has preserved its voice in modern society:

For a long while, Americans thought Catholicism was an un-American form of religion, but in our current situation, Catholicism alone appears able to synthesize faith and reason long enough, broadly enough, and deeply enough to avoid sectarianism. John Courtney Murray, the American Jesuit who influenced the Second Vatican Council's decree on religious liberty, made essentially this argument, and the thirty years of debate over abortion has confirmed it. Catholic thought now defines the nonsecularist terms of American discourse—and does so, at its best, without threatening either the religious freedom or nonestablishment clauses of the First Amendment.

The Church's structure is among the decisive factors in my decision to become — and remain — Catholic. The hierarchy, properly understood with distinctions between the prudential and the divinely imparted, is in keeping with the way in which human nature requires community-level disagreements to be resolved and foundational beliefs to be maintained as our understanding of the world evolves.

If there is a capital-T Truth, then something like the Catholic Church is essential toward its pursuit, not the least because the institution gives us confidence to meet and address disagreements.

Not Asked, but Told

Popular wisdom insists that social issues are a political wedge wielded from the right to divide Americans for political gain. Experience suggests that the cynical aggressors, in this sense, are actually more likely to reside on the left. Not for no reason has President Obama played the "don't ask, don't tell" card as his political agenda falls apart on the grounds that it's extremely unpopular. Gotta distract the rabble, you know.

As a political calculation, I think he's wrong. The movement against him, most visible in the tea parties, is not going to take its eye off the economic and civic issues on which the president has us all so spooked just because he shouted "gays" in an active military. And as a policy decision, Anchor Rising contributor Mac Owens explains why Obama's wrong in a Wall Street Journal op-ed:

The congressional findings supporting the 1993 law (section 654 of title 10, United States Code) reflect the common-sense observation that military organizations exist to win wars. To maximize the chances of battlefield success, military organizations must overcome the paralyzing effects of fear on the individual soldier and what the famous Prussian war theorist Carl von Clausewitz called "friction" and the "fog of uncertainty."

This they do by means of an ethos that stresses discipline, morale, good order and unit cohesion. Anything that threatens the nonsexual bonding that lies at the heart of unit cohesion adversely affects morale, disciple and good order, generating friction and undermining this ethos. Congress at the time and many today, including members of the military and members of Congress from both parties, believe that service by open homosexuals poses such a threat.

Mac's also got an FAQ of sorts related to the essay on NRO.

The bottom line is that liberals, progressives, or whatever we're agreeing to call them these days want to disallow society from making distinctions between classes of people, even when those classes have relevant differences, in order to make certain political disagreements seem more important. How one bonds with others, and with whom one bonds in what way, has significant implications in the life-and-death situations that military personnel face regularly. But the likes of President Obama find it convenient to leverage the deep, personal feelings involved in sexual orientation, so all else must be treated as secondary.

A Millennium of Separating

With the intention of zooming out a bit for some mid-afternoon reflection, I note Robert Louis Wilken's review of a book by Tom Holland and its striking proclamation:

That, at least, is the thesis of Tom Holland's new book, The Forge of Christendom, a provocative and elegantly written account of the end of the first millennium and the beginning of the second. [Pope Gregory VII] did not live to witness his ultimate victory. But "the cause for which he fought," writes Holland, a British historian and radio personality, "was destined to establish itself as perhaps the defining characteristic of Western civilization." That characteristic is the division of the world into Church and state, with these realms distinct from each other. In Holland's eyes, Gregory "stood as godfather to the future."

As the subsequent millennium completes its turn, the trend has become for the state to leverage that principle of separation to bind the Church. Where we'll be 1,000 years from now will have much to do with our resolution of the current conflict.

Anti-Abstinence Crusaders See What They Want to See

On the day that the news section of the Providence Journal acknowledged that abstinence-only sex-ed programs could potentially be successful, the editors of the Lifebeat section thought it necessary to rush to the defense of their modern kulturkampf with the headline, "Program blamed for rise in teen pregnancy" on the section's front page. Of course, the immediate question is who is doing the blaming:

The national teen pregnancy rate is on the rise again after 15 years of decline, and the group providing the data lays the blame squarely on the Bush administration’s stepped-up funding for abstinence-only education programs.

The Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit that’s aligned with Planned Parenthood but nevertheless is respected for its data on reproductive issues, reported last week that the U.S. teen pregnancy rate had risen by 3 percent from 2005 to 2006, the latest year for which figures are available.

What makes the citation especially troublesome is that the article specifically notes the research of John Santelli. Back when one of his studies was fresh, something in the reported data bothered me, so I actually purchased a copy of the study in order to review the methodology. What I discovered was that Santelli's basic math simply didn't show what he claimed it to show. In a nutshell, his equations credited contraception not only with its own success rate, but also with the success of increasing abstinence. My communications with Dr. Santelli became snippier, on his end, in proportion to the specificity of my explanations.

The basic pattern of distorted findings being spun to even greater distortions in the press is very familiar. Indeed, back in 2004, the New York Times heralded a study disclaiming the effectiveness of an abstinence pledge. When I looked into the numbers, I noticed not only that abstinence had, in fact, increased, but also that many of the respondents who had not "lived up to their vows" to remain abstinent had actually broken that vow after making another: they got married.

Thus, we end up with a bifurcated society, in which readers of the Projo's Lifebeat section heed the research wing of Planned Parenthood, while others share Robert Rector's understanding of the situation:

No one knowledgeable about abstinence education, however, would find this startling. In fact, eleven previous sound studies showed strong positive effects from abstinence programs. The mainstream media simply ignored them.

Human nature will always tend toward a (generally productive) battle between groups preferring different conclusions. But when that battle is amped up on the steroids of massive amounts of federal funding and even more substantial potential for the regulation of people's lives, objectivity — not to mention common sense — becomes more difficult to maintain. (See also, climate change.)

The Confident Pluralist

His specific topic is contemporary Judaism, but Ben Greenberg makes a worthwhile point related to pluralism more generally:

Orthodox Judaism was supposed to founder on rugged American individualism, but quite the opposite has happened: A Judaism assembled at a buffet of individual preferences has small interest for young adults seeking direction and meaning in their lives. Young Jews are likely either to abandon their religion altogether or to take it seriously. That is why there is a migration to Orthodoxy by young Jews raised in liberal or secular households. ...

Because the Modern Orthodox are profoundly secure in their religious observance, they can engage the modern world with self-confidence.

Real — substantial and healthy — pluralism isn't something that exists inside the individual, where it can only manifest as insecurity and confusion. One cannot respect and engage difference when one strives to be in some way identical to everybody as a first principle.

A society can only harness the dynamism of diversity when individuals experience it from strong positions of confidence in their own fundamental beliefs, with tolerance for those who disagree.

In the Tech Bubble

Prediction: This is going to turn out to be a major issue in a decade or two:

Smart phones, MP3 players, laptops and other devices are the air kids breathe — perhaps too deeply, judging from a new study that shows children ages 8 to 18 devote an average of seven hours and 38 minutes a day consuming some form of media for fun. That's an hour and 17 minutes more than they did five years ago, said the study's sponsor, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. And they're champion multitaskers, packing content on top of content for an even heavier onslaught. ...

The researchers warned that further study is required to link media use with any impact on the health of young people or their grades. But 47 percent of heavy media users among those surveyed said they earn mostly Cs or lower, compared with 23 percent of light users. The study classified heavy users as consuming more than 16 hours a day and light users as less than three hours.

The problem is greater than just time away and distraction from studies, although those are clearly detrimental. As a parent, I can testify that even within a few weeks of introduction of one of these addictive technologies within the house, personalities begin to change. When I was young the parental concern was the deterioration of attention span, but now, it's as if the kids forget how to entertain themselves and play creatively without the hyper-stimulation of gadgets.

Without a doubt, society benefits greatly from technological advances, but we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that they amount to blind experiments on future generations.

A Relationship with Knowledge

First, a line that's supremely relevant for those of us who've been beating our heads against a wall of political inertia, in Rhode Island:

In my experience, compulsively objective scientists are evenly matched, or even outmatched, by shamelessly subjective humanists. More than once I’ve been shocked by colleagues who seem unable to grasp that richly elaborated accounts of personal experiences do not refute claims about statistical tendencies.

That's from R.R. Reno's response to a book addressing our relationship with knowledge by Paul Griffiths:

The first half of Intellectual Appetite provides a metaphysical analysis (or, more accurately, the grammar of a metaphysical analysis—Griffiths operates as formally as possible to encompass a wide range of metaphysical options) that allows us to explain why, for a Christian, the basic move of "enclosure by sequestration" trains the mind to be false to reality. The world is not made up of tiny little bits of disconnected reality, all just waiting for our mental appropriation. Everything is saturated with the sustaining power of God’s creative will. Nothing merely exists, because everything comes into being and endures in the shimmering light of the divine gift of existence.

By the phrase "enclosure by sequestration" Reno means to indicate the human tendency to disassemble the components of reality for inspection. As a practical matter, this is how the limits of our own capacity for comprehension require us to proceed, but the danger is that we'll pick and choose those components that serve the reality that we prefer to conceive. If we were to stroll farther into the metaphysical weeds, I'd suggest that we do, in a real way, succeed in constructing our own realities, but that doing so does not make each variation equally valid. They can all be measured by their distance from and movement with respect to objective Truth.

In this view, nothing — no action or thought — is inactive, because what we believe the world to be manipulates reality as surely as what we do with our physical bodies. So, I disagree with Reno's interpretation, here:

In his Confessions, St. Augustine provides a particularly vivid account of the power of spectacles. He reports that his close friend Alypius, though possessing a good and cultured character, became addicted to the bloody, violent games that provided civic entertainment in the ancient world. At first, Alypius "held such spectacles in aversion," Augustine writes. One day, some friends persuaded him to go. Alypius steeled himself, closing his eyes to avoid participating in the barbarism. At the crucial moment, as the blood gushed and the crowd roared, "he was overcome by curiosity," and "he opened his eyes."

But Augustine's account does not turn toward ownership, as the phenomenology preferred by Griffiths suggests. On the contrary, all the images Augustine uses point in the opposite direction: "He was struck in the soul by a wound graver than the gladiator, whose fall had caused the roar." "His eyes were riveted." He "was inebriated by bloodthirsty pleasure." He becomes addicted and captivated. It isn't that Alypius owns the spectacle. The spectacle owns Alypius.

It would be closer to the truth, I'd suggest, that however much he may enslave himself to his own fixations, the voyeur is actually pursuing a sense of ownership of the gladiator's final moments, as if for a collection of images that the spectator has accumulated. Moreover, the scene allows him to participate without immediate bodily risk — to benefit whether the gladiator survives or dies.

The viewing is not passive. It constructs the communal hand that forces the gladiator into a fight for his real life. It represents a movement toward a particular understanding of reality, one in which the senses are deadened to violence in a way that minimizes the travesty and in which the participant is not a person with a soul with which to communicate, but an object. Hence, the progression toward ever more gratuitous scenes and perhaps an increasing likelihood of acting them out.

The Benefit to the Giver

BobN makes an excellent comment:

Libraries were all we had before the Internet. They were the original broad and deep pool of knowledge available to all.

Of course, the original free library as invented by Ben Franklin was funded by private benefactors who subscribed to its capital and operating costs purely as a matter of private philanthropy. The idea that libraries would be owned and funded by government violated the contemporary concept of the role of government in society.

Private philanthropy confers benefits on both donors and recipients. People who supported the libraries and other philanthropic institutions gained status and affection from their fellow citizens and the recognition that they had nobly done good things for their fellow man, while those fellow citizens benefited from the libraries, or fire departments, or hospitals.

When government takes over "good works" it perverts that social bond. Voluntary philanthropy becomes taxes extorted under the law's threat of force. The government usurps the philanthropist's social position and takes credit itself for what it did not provide (which is fraud). And the beneficiaries are no longer grateful, but come to see the benefits as "entitlements" to which they have a "right".

Thus we slide into the Hell of Progressivism. There is nothing compassionate about government being involved in social services. It's all about making people dependent on politicians and bureaucrats so they can be bribed or threatened to continue voting those politicians into power.

I agree with this argument, for the most part, and the sentiment, wholly. But it's worth questioning whether advances in transportation and communication technology have changed the equation almost beyond applicability. Wealthy people once had a much greater incentive to pursue "status and affection from their fellow citizens." For one thing, peer groups were much more local, whereas now, the wealthy see themselves as an international set. Whether the middle-to-upper crusts within the nearest ten miles think well of them is of diminished concern.

Security is also less of an issue. Before phones and automobiles and fancy CSI forensics, angry mobs were an actual risk. A mugging on a dark road could be a more stealthy crime. And a house could burn down with no hope of stopping flames begun in the dead of night.

This is all before one takes into account decreased religiosity (which, of course, is related to the other trends). Frankly, I don't have a philosophical answer, from a conservative point of view, other than to suggest that the government decision making be pushed as far out toward discrete communities as possible.

Abstinence as Good Decision

Having challenged the premises (and the math) of naysayers of abstinence-only education, I don't find these results surprising:

Billed as the first rigorous research to show long-term success with an abstinence-only approach, the study differed from traditional programs that have lost federal and state support in recent years. The classes didn't preach saving sex until marriage or disparage condom use.

Instead, it involved assignments to help sixth- and seventh graders see the drawbacks to sexual activity at their age, including having them list the pros and cons themselves. Their cons far outnumbered the pros. ...

Two years later, about one-third of abstinence-only students said they'd had sex since the classes ended, versus nearly half — about 49 percent — of the control group. Sexual activity rates in the other two groups didn't differ from the control group.

The bottom line is this: Safe-sex education gives children knowledge about how to do something — and tells them that it's "safe." Effective abstinence-only curricula help them to understand why they shouldn't act on that knowledge.

Such programs should involve lessons in self esteem, in decision-making, in life decisions, in cultural expectations, and so on. What our society must learn, above all, is that sex is not the be-all-end-all of human existence, and that at a young life can be much better spent than dealing with the obstacles, discomforts, and obsessions that typically follow sexual activity outside of monogamous adult relationships.

The Inadvertent Rudeness of Technology

Bob Kerr writes in yesterday's Providence Journal

The first time I saw a laptop on a bar top was at Local 121 in Providence a few months ago. It was a moment of social breakdown. In a place meant for the soothing embrace of a cocktail, a woman apparently saw no problem, no code violations, in plopping down her slab of technology and hooking up with the universe.

I know some bars where putting a laptop down next to the beer coasters would probably bring the threat of a laptop flying, followed closely by its owner. But Local 121 is a subdued and tasteful place, retaining much of the original elegance from the days when it was the bar of the Dreyfus Hotel. The bartender did not lean over and threaten to bounce the laptop off the wall. The clueless offender was allowed to click away.

The rudely placed laptop came not long after a woman at Borders bookstore in Garden City told me all about her troublesome daughter. I’m pretty sure she didn’t intend to tell me anything, but she shared every anguished word with me and others who were looking for a good book. She poured her worries into her cell phone with a voice that spilled out beyond the latest nonfiction and paperback mysteries. She was in a bookstore, cutting into literary considerations with a private conversation turned public. Like the laptop user at the bar, she appeared to have not a clue that she was pushing her life in the way of others.

So we've got two separate matters here. A computer at the bar and the public cell phone conversationalist who believes s/he is perpetually surrounded by deaf people.

I am 150% with Bob on the latter. The loud cell phone user is in a slightly different rudeness category as the point-of-purchase cell phonist, though both involve the inflicting of personal information, willy nilly, on the public. I was in a Whole Foods check-out line a couple of weeks ago behind a woman who carried out the entire process - loading of the conveyor, scanning of items, bagging and paying - talking intensely into a cell phone. When the clerk turned to me and my items, I observed that she needed a "No Cell Phone" sign at her register. She replied in cheerful bemusement and a killer Southern accent, "Ah just learned all of that girl's business!" Indeed. Whether or not she was interested.

So, absolutely. The mis-placed and/or loud cell phonist. Inconsiderate and boorish.

What I'm not getting is the laptop computer at the bar. Why is this rude? What unspoken bar etiquette has been breached? How is this "a moment of social breakdown" that makes Bob think wistfully of direct, corrective action?

... the bartender faced with a customer who sits down at the bar and opens a laptop might have a few practiced suggestions picked up in technology etiquette classes. The bartender might say, for example: “If you don’t want 16 ounces of Irish stout poured on your keyboard, you might want to take you and your laptop somewhere else.”

When Activism Becomes Ocean's Ten

Internet technology and revolutions in communications create a razor's edge between magnificent and dangerous. People are decreasingly held down by a lack of connections or resources, but by the same token, there is less of a vetting process for advancement, and the direct chute to stardom obviates a sense of long, slow investment in one's position.

So, it's disappointing, but not entirely surprising, to learn that one of the kids behind the revelatory ACORN videos appears to have dived too quickly into the movie in his head:

A conservative activist who posed as a pimp to target the community-organizing group ACORN and the son of a federal prosecutor were among four men arrested and accused of trying to tamper with phones at Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu's office.

Activist James O'Keefe, 25, recorded two of the other suspects with his cell phone as they walked into the office dressed like telephone repairman and said they needed to fix problems with the phone system, according to an FBI affidavit.

The interesting blend of Candid Camera, political activism, and alternative media coalesced into an extremely powerful tool to expose ACORN. Turned toward nakedly partisan espionage, it's offensive and stupid.

Learning to Be Good

A comment section recently brought out the topic of whether children are born with a moral sense and ended with BobN arguing as follows:

... Young minds are very plastic and amoral.

As Reagan said, freedom is never more than one generation away from being lost.

Today's society is filled with examples of young people without moral compasses. From the gangs of Los Angeles (or Providence) to the children in madrassas preparing to become the suicide bombers of al Qaeda at the extreme, to the welfare queens and "baby mamas" and their no-strings impregnators who view welfare as a career, to business-school students who cheerfully admit to cheating to get ahead and think it is a normal part of business, to politicians who speak of democracy while plotting to seize tyrannical power, there are an awful lot of people who are not wired to see the truth.

Of course there are many counterexamples. In fact, the vast majority of people still understand right and wrong and act accordingly. And at the extreme of this end of the spectrum are the valiant patriots who volunteer to serve our country and literally fight for freedom and our way of life.

My own belief is that morality is just like everything else in that it is a process of development. We're all born with an innate sense of what is right — a conscience that seeks for God. Genetics set boundaries and probabilities for our behavior, but the rest develops over time based on experiences and cultural input. I once heard some celebrity suggest that pit bulls are a danger because they have such big hearts, and if people pervert their loyalty and desire to please, the dogs can become monsters. Just so with people: Our drive to do what is right can be perverted so dramatically that an impulse toward transcendence can be made to point toward that which is immoral.

As Archbishop George Niederauer writes:

How do we form and guide our consciences? While the Church teaches that each of us is called to judge and direct his or her own actions, it also teaches that, like any good judge, each conscience masters the law and listens to expert testimony about the law. This process is called the education and formation of conscience.

It is by following our inherent longing for Truth up the structure built of revelation and tradition — of history and cultural experience — that we achieve both moral goodness and independence.

"Mugged By Ultrasound"

A new poll finds that "56% of all Americans and 58% of those 18-29 years old say abortion ‘morally wrong’."

“Millennials” (those 18-29) consider abortion to be “morally wrong” even more (58%) than Baby Boomers (those 45-64) (51%). Generation X (those 30-44) are similar to Millennials (60% see abortion as “morally wrong”). More than 6 in 10 of the Greatest Generation (those 65+) feel the same....

Advances in technology, show clearly – and ever more clearly – that an unborn child is completely a human being. That, coupled with the large number of Americans who know one of the many people who has been negatively affected by abortion are certainly two of the reasons that Americans are increasingly uncomfortable with Roe v. Wade’s legacy of abortion, and with abortion generally. The majority of Americans now understand that abortion has consequences, and that those consequences are not good.

...advances in ultrasound imaging and abortion procedures have forced providers ever closer to the nub of their work. Especially in abortions performed far enough along in gestation that the fetus is recognizably a tiny baby, this intimacy exacts an emotional toll, stirring sentiments for which doctors, nurses, and aides are sometimes unprepared. Most apparently have managed to reconcile their belief in the right to abortion with their revulsion at dying and dead fetuses, but a noteworthy number have found the conflict unbearable and have defected to the pro-life cause.

[Some] converts were driven into the pro-life movement by advances in ultrasound technology. The most recent example is Abby Johnson, the former director of Dallas-area Planned Parenthood. After watching, via ultrasound, an embryo “crumple” as it was suctioned out of its mother’s womb, Johnson reported a “conversion in my heart.” Likewise, Joan Appleton was the head nurse at a large abortion facility in Falls Church, Virginia, and a NOW activist. Appleton performed thousands of abortions with aplomb until a single ultrasound-assisted abortion rattled her. As Appleton remembers, “I was watching the screen. I saw the baby pull away. I saw the baby open his mouth. .  .  . After the procedure I was shaking, literally.”

Perhaps the fear of sexually transmitted diseases such as HIV/AIDS has faded as a deterrent to unprotected sex. The increase in the number of Latinos in the U.S., who now have the highest rate of teen pregnancy of any group in the country, may provide a demographic answer. Alternatively, the rising rate of pregnancy among adolescents may be part of a broader societal trend, since birth rates have also increased among women in every age group and among older, unmarried women. It’s even been suggested that the change represents “prevention-fatigue” associated with the ubiquity of prevention programs.

In any case, if the end of the decline in the teenage-pregnancy rate is in fact a real pattern, we need to address it head on. Delaying pregnancy is critically important for improving the life opportunities for both teenage girls and their babies.

Corrupted by Association

My Rhode Island Catholic column, this month, takes up the corrupting influence that associations and images can have on our thoughts:

We live in a society that's much too quick to dismiss the significance of simple associations, taking on faith that the images that splash across television screens and flood public spaces couldn't possibly lodge in the mind with any effect. But surely they do. A man upon meeting a woman will have different thoughts behind his eyes if she reminds him of a model whom he's seen in a provocative pose than if she resembles an actress known for a role as a loving wife or if he’s seen her likeness on a prayer card.

One should hope that decorum and maturity will adjust mental images before they translate into behavior, and in this example, the woman will have the greatest effect on the man’s perception of her. Still, when vile associations pile upon each other, ever greater adjustments and contradictions will be necessary in order to dispel the collage that they create.

Don't Let Randomness Validate Chaos

The photograph of the two-year-old Haitian being handed into his mother's arms has got to be among the most amazing captures of human expression that I've ever seen. The ordeal from which the boy has just been rescued is still discernible in his face, but his focus on his mother mixes with, well, almost surprise, as if of relief that the calamity did not wholly recast reality. The permanent remains — air and light and mom.

Of course, among the first lost dreams of youth is that parents are not permanent, and we adults know that this particular boy's ordeal was only just beginning when the Belgian and Spanish rescuers pulled him from the wreckage. Still, there's something in Redjeson Hausteen Claude's eyes, in the photograph, that needn't ever become an impossibility and that, indeed, we ought to strive to preserve at all times, for ourselves and for our culture.

Such preservation begins by addressing the inclination to see the catastrophe as an example of cruel randomness. From my perspective, randomness is hardly applicable. We live in a volatile world — on a planet of stone, fire, and fluid — and during a time that offers tremendous opportunity for preparation. Haiti is an overpopulated and underdeveloped nation that is far from fit to withstand the inevitable shocks that its location makes inevitable. Its condition, in that respect, results from accumulated decisions of human beings the world 'round.

This is to blame neither the victims nor those who've victimized them, but to point out the aggregate manifestation of choices — of free will in a reality that is punctuated with hard stops that we lack the knowledge to predict. Take it one step farther: such free will could not exist if there were no real choices to make or consequences to them. That one person should suffer for others' decisions is certainly unfair, but it's an injustice of human origin, not (if I may finally introduce the unspoken) of divine making.

Acknowledging as much is critical because a sense of meaning and purpose — a sense of a caring parent with whom we will ultimately be united — repercusses in our behavior. Without it, human cruelty takes something of the absolution of natural disaster. A loss of the rightly ordered perspective ultimately results in the piling of travesty upon tragedy:

As we hear reports of gunfire overnight, FEMA reports deteriorating security conditions continue to rise with widespread looting and armed gangs brandishing firearms. There are also reports of unescorted aid workers being assaulted for supplies are rising The problem also is the supply chain. Right now I am looking at a massive amount of food and water here at the airport, but only the U.S. Military is doing anything.

It allows fear to overcome responsibility:

Earthquake victims, writhing in pain and grasping at life, watched doctors and nurses walk away from a field hospital Friday night after a Belgian medical team evacuated the area, saying it was concerned about security.

The decision left CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Sanjay Gupta as the only doctor at the hospital to get the patients through the night. ...

CNN video from the scene Friday night shows the Belgian team packing up its supplies and leaving with an escort of blue-helmeted U.N. peacekeepers in marked trucks.

Perhaps we cannot confidently predict the decisions that we'll make under pressure of panic, and surely nobody is innocent of poor, even unjust, choices made at a distance of time and space and probability from their consequences. But the likelihood that we'll choose well increases, it seems to me, to the extent that we keep Redjeson Hausteen Claude's expression ever poised just beneath the skin.

ADDENDUM:

Wonderfully, there are no shortage of methods of donating toward the assistance of the people of Haiti. Here are two opportunities:

1. Catholic Relief Services
2. American Red Cross

Genius and Well Behaved? Nonsense.

Theodore Dalrymple's look back at Sherlock Holmes, the literary, not cinematic, character, makes a conservative desire to read the books again and avoid the movie. When the film's trailer appeared, I lamented the cultural insecurity that requires every hero to be a such a superhero as to exist outside of societal etiquette. Robert Downey Jr.'s Holmes is a boorish ninja. Dalrymple notes the cultural thread, as well, when speaking of Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle:

Conan Doyle's fundamental humanity and decency, as evident in his life as in his work, shine through the canon. This in itself is a matter of interest, if it is accepted — as I think it should be — that the canon is itself a manifestation of literary genius. We have been so persuaded that genius and disgraceful conduct go together that we find it difficult to believe that an affable man such as Conan Doyle can be possessed both of goodness and of superior talent; indeed, appalling conduct is sometimes itself taken as evidence of the greatest talent. If geniuses are badly behaved, ought that not to mean that the badly behaved are geniuses?

It is as if, in the current era, we despise rules so thoroughly that we fantasize about being so magnificent, as individuals, that we needn't heed them. Of course, Dalrymple also highlights something in Holmes that a declining civilization should consider:

He is a model of self-mastery of the kind that allows eccentricity to flourish, as it so richly once did in England.

Eccentricity must follow from self-mastery. Our culture has been so effective because it has learned millennia of dos and don'ts for us. The rules no longer apply when you've followed them so scrupulously as to no longer need them, and it is not with disdain that we transcend them, but gratitude.

(None of which to say that rules don't sometimes work their way into the culture that deserve to be discarded with disdain so that the civilization can advance. My topic, above, is the collection of behavioral expectations that our anti-heroic superheroes ignore as a matter of course.)

Successfully Avoiding Divorce Requires Marriage

I've been meaning to point out a problem with Lefteris Pavlides's objection to a recent report that Rhode Island is among the unhappiest states in the country. Declares Pavlides:

Year after year the so-called "happy" states are on the top of broken homes and children in single families. For my money whole, two-parent families have a better chance at true happiness. The states with the highest divorce rates also have the lowest taxes, which means they have the lowest services for those suffering and the worst educational opportunities for their children. These not very children-friendly places can not be very happy.

His evidence for this claim is that the supposedly most happy states have higher divorce rates than the unhappy states. It's been a while since I dug into these numbers deeply, but I'm sure my 2004 discovery holds: Divorce rates are calculated per 1,000 of the population, not of marriages, and the states with the highest divorce rates per 1,000 residents also have much higher marriage rates per 1,000 residents.

If I were inclined to provocation, I'd suggest that married Northeasterners should hold on to their spouses for dear life... miserable people might find it difficult to find gold twice.

Pants on the Ground

Joe the Plumber....Rick Santelli...."General" Larry Platt? There's something about wannabe American Idol auditioner Larry Platt's song "Pants on the Ground" that is striking a chord.

Believing in the Echo

In a This I Believe - RI segment on WRNI, Jim Stahl, the former publisher of the children's magazine, Merlyn's Pen, talks about the creative wisdom of children. Me, I don't believe this notion of the wise youth. Almost by definition, wisdom is impossible for the young.

To the extent that children seem wise, it is not creative but recitative. They're simplifying and reflecting what we've taught them — often with their own unique twist, to be sure, but not with an insight unavailable to adults.

Consider a poem from his magazine, of the thumb-in-the-eye-of-God variety, that Stahl offers as an example. He says:

In hundreds of classrooms that read this poem, discussions took off, all of them launched by the words of one creative teen.

With the poem's authorship a generation after John Lennon had sung that "God is a concept by which we measure our pain," I'd suggest the somewhat different perspective that it was a hit because a Baby Boomer publisher thought it provocative and an army of boomer teachers thought it was subversive to teach it, utilizing the classroom to reinforce or subvert cultural norms taught in the home — all with the perfect comfort of a groupthink attack on a safe target.

Stahl goes on to advocate for an escalation of our appreciation of smart and creative kids to a level similar to our celebration of star athletes, and with that I agree. In the context of schools, however, we run into the problem that challenging children who are advanced academically, rather than athletically, takes time and resources — at a minimum, hiring an adult competent to direct a discussion of Moby Dick, say, or to create an insightful presentation of current events, providing a context that the students inevitably lack. As we've witnessed to tragic degree in Rhode Island, the resources that might be thus allocated are apt to be sucked up into teacher contracts or mandated for use on special needs children.

And then there's the ideological problem. One gets the impression, as from the single example highlighted from Stahl's entire career as a publisher, that those who might advocate for the encouragement of teenage creativity have a decided preference for smart kids to come to particular conclusions. The really smart kids will discern those conclusions to be wrong, but most will follow them into their destructive circularity.

Taking the Battle Out of the Boy

It's odd how details can lodge in the memory. On an annual basis, my parents would take me on the short trip over the border from our home in New Jersey to The Renaissance Faire in New York state. Each ended with a joust and hand-to-hand combat over a noble lady's honor, and the children in attendance were permitted to run out onto the field, when the dust cleared, and gather up chunks of the lances, which were invariably made of soft, easily broken wood.

These lengths of weaponry — one year cedar, one year pine — were ideal for the important work of battling a particular bush behind my apartment. When the villain swallowed my souvenir beyond reach amidst its innards, one year, I learned that lances are best wielded as swords than as spears. My mission had apparently already been accomplished, however, as evidenced by the many years of peace at the apartment complex.

Those of us who were formerly boys are likely to have ample examples of such martial exercises to bring to mind when reading entries into culture-war literature such as Sally Thomas's explanation that "a desire," among boys, "to commit violence is not the same thing as a desire to commit evil." When a spring morning at the tail end of the millennium staggered at news of a school shooting in Colorado, there was much familiar about the perpetrators. The difference — profound in outcome, although perhaps subtle in origin — is that my in-school fantasies were of repelling attack, not initiating it. Whenever a helicopter flew overhead, it was Red Dawn, calling for heroic resolve.

The cultural and personal shifts that lead in these two opposing directions are likely manifold and difficult to tease from the rest of life, but I can't help but see something significant in an anecdote that Thomas presents:

Meanwhile, psychologist Leonard Sax, author of the 2007 book, Boys Adrift, cites the example of a typical junior-high literature assignment on William Golding's Lord of the Flies that a preteen boy has crumpled and left, with other unfinished homework, in the bottom of his backpack. "Write a short essay in Piggy's voice, describing how you feel about the other boys picking on you," reads the assignment. This is stupid, the boy says, and he isn't doing it. Why not? "I’m not Piggy," the boy says. "I'm not some fat loser. If I'd been on that island, I'd have smashed his face myself!"

I can't think of a mother, myself included, who could hear her child voice that sentiment and not cringe. To consider that your baby not only could want to smash another person's face but could assert with perfect certainty that he would if the chance arose, is to recoil in horror. It is to realize, as Anne Roche Muggeridge did while watching her sons take turns throwing each other into a brick wall, that what you have in your house is not a human like you but a human unlike you. In short, as Muggeridge puts it, you are bringing up an alien.

The author of the assignment was, clearly, seeking to encourage empathy in the students, and empathy is a valuable trait for both caregivers and heroes, alike. But as with much else in modern educational culture and psychology, the above example is crafted in a form more suitable for girls than for boys. It's been some years, but as I recall, Lord of the Flies was not bereft of good boys. This young reader was reacting to the enforced feminization of the question itself and rebelled by associating with the rougher, more viciously violent characters. A healthier, more productive question might have been, "If Piggy were your friend, how might you have defended him?" Implicitly, then, not protecting the downtrodden would have been evidence of fear.

There will always be those, male and female, who seek to dishonor the noble and innocent. There will always be students who incline toward meanness. That reality, however, is not evidence of a need for sensitivity training, but of a need to produce sufficient numbers in each generation who feel called to engage evil in battle. Not the least is this true because, as we've had cause to relearn in the past decade, the enemy will not always be within.

The Horror of Modern Youth

In response to an essay in which David Goldman suggests a connection between current events and recent trends in the popularity of horror films, Fr. Benjamin Sember, of Wisconsin, produces the following wisdom:

Rather than trying to attach the recent rise of the horror genre to September 11, 2001, your article ought to have looked at April 20, 1999, the day of the Columbine High School shooting. Our teens are terrorized, and the real possibility that they might be shot to death by a classmate while sitting in second-hour algebra is only the tip of the iceberg. High school has become a nonstop calendar of classes, heavy loads of homework, sports, drama club, choir, band, and endless practices. Teens are being eaten alive by the demands and tugged apart by the many activities. Rarely are these activities carried out in pursuit of what is true and beautiful. Instead, they become a constant competition to avoid falling short against a hundred measuring sticks as teens compete with each other for breathing space and attention.

An adjustment should be made for the apparent possibility that Fr. Sember's experience with today's youth is somewhat selective in a way that tilts his observations toward over-achieving kids. Also among the pre-adult demographic — and no less attracted to the horror genre, I'd assume — are those whose anxiety derives from a conclusion that they cannot compete. They'll not likely admit that concern — might not know it's there — and it often manifests as a rebellion against the premise that there's something worth competing for.

What occurred to me, while reading Sember's letter, is that young adults face all of these stressors while inhabiting a society that offers them no ballast. They're supposed to be liberated theologically, socially, and sexually. They're supposed to blaze their own path in the realm of behavioral standards, even as they strive to live up to high expectations of achievement. One needn't be a dyed-in-the-wool conservative to agree that well-learned behavioral standards are a prerequisite for success that derives from merit rather than luck.

A plausible argument could be made that the characteristic plot of the horror genre appeals to the modern youth not so much in their expression of pure violence, nor in the voyeurism of watching others suffer, nor the comfort of presenting (for a time) horrors as the stuff of fantasy, but because it leaves viewers feeling that they can strive and overcome challenges even when all the rules of reality are thrown out. On the broad tasks of defining our lives, our society tends toward challenges without rules — expectations without instructions — and it is indeed the stuff of fantasy to believe that a society that rejects principles of self control could defeat the most terrifying creatures of the imagination.

An Obligation on the He Who Cannot Be Obliged

To some degree, the theological principle that Bruce Marshall describes here can be seen as a core division point of human ideology:

If God had remitted our sins by sheer forgiveness—sent them away or simply declared them nonexistent—then our sins indeed would be gone, and we no longer would be sinners. We would, however, be mere spectators to our own salvation: observers who simply noted this fact about ourselves, without any involvement of our hearts and wills. By treating our sins as a debt for which he will accept payment, God gives humanity a genuine share in its own salvation. As any child knows whose father has given him or her money to buy him a Christmas gift, there is joy in this that can come in no other way, even though—or, better, precisely because—we know well that we are simply giving back what we have freely received.

Theologically, I'd suggest that the salvific transaction is actually more profound than that. Undeserved blessings are arbitrary and may be removed arbitrarily. God's granting us an ability earn salvation conversely creates an obligation on Him to provide it — to reward.

Thinking of the myriad people, in modern society, who appear to believe that they are owed happiness and comfort, in material matters, and should face no strings along with spiritual beneficence, it's difficult to avoid the impression of a paradox: Many are eager to trade that which makes them human — the ability to judge the world and choose a path through it — for creature comforts, yet in so doing, they inflate their importance in the universe.

The image that comes to mind is of an impetuous child who understands that he or she is gong to receive a reward, anyway, and scorns and challenges his or her parents for imposing a chore — a game. The parents are giving the child an opportunity to place a binding claim on them, and the child is insisting that he or she already owns that claim, and more, as payment for deigning to exist.

Intellectuals

Thomas Sowell:

...It may seem strange that so many people of great intellect have said and done so many things whose consequences ranged from counterproductive to catastrophic. Yet it is not so surprising when we consider whether anybody has ever had the range of knowledge required to make the sweeping kinds of decisions that so many intellectuals are prone to make, especially when they pay no price for being wrong.

Intellectuals and their followers have often been overly impressed by the fact that intellectuals tend, on average, to have more knowledge than other individuals in their society. What they have overlooked is that intellectuals have far less knowledge than the total knowledge possessed by the millions of other people whom they disdain and whose decisions they seek to override.

We have had to learn the consequences of elite preemption the hard way — and many of us have yet to learn that lesson.

Proof of the Existence of Government

Somehow, one is not surprised that this instance of governance has not sparked the shock and outrage that accompanied the decision of Swiss voters to ban minarets:

... the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, has ruled that the government of Italy must remove crucifixes from public school classrooms throughout that country. According to the decision of the court, "The presence of the crucifix . . . could easily be interpreted by pupils of all ages as a religious sign." This, the court said, could be "disturbing for pupils who practiced other religions or were atheists."

Yes, public/private distinctions apply, but the question is one of governance. The Swiss have determined public scenery to be subject to public considerations of culture, and the Italians should be able to do the same with public classrooms. If a distant, largely unaccountable government in another country can decide such matters of local taste, then — whatever one's belief in God — there's no such thing as self-government.

An Untaught Generation

The fourth letter to the editor of First Things in this set surely expresses the perspective of many Westerners now entering middle age and finding the unexpected light of adulthood opening their eyes:

Meanwhile, I have gravitated to a certain type of mommy-blog: one written by a stay-at-home mother, lovingly grateful to her provider-man, capably in charge of every detail of her children's lives and home: the Angel in the House, as we might have sneered back in English 101. While the blogger and I remain quite different people, she seems to have grasped, early on, some essential fact about gender relations that no one ever told my husband or me. Those brave and brainy revolutionaries who raised us—parents, professors, Self magazine—never so much as hinted that someday we might want to act like men and women. Having dodged that retrograde fate, we had turned into neutered freaks, mired in resentments and domestic dysfunction. Our lucky kids!

This is not to call for a return to the inequalities of the past, and it's not to say that everybody in an entire generation was raised equivalently. (My own upbringing, for example, was not as drastic as the writer's.) But I don't think that there's any question, on the broad level of a culture, that the middle and later decades of the twentieth century saw a too-dramatic disregarding of deep cultural and biological tendencies.

Boundaries for Affirmative Action

Yup. That's the habit of academia... always in need of correction for favoring men:

A federal civil rights agency investigating possible gender discrimination in college admissions will subpoena data from more than a dozen mid-Atlantic universities, officials said Thursday.

The probe by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is focusing on whether some colleges favor men by admitting them at higher rates than women, or by offering them more generous aid packages.

But hold on:

Women outnumber men nearly 60 percent to 40 percent in higher education nationally. The probe grew out of anecdotal evidence and news accounts that admissions officials are discriminating against women to promote a more even gender mix, said commission spokeswoman Lenore Ostrowsky.

Apparently, it was insufficiently understood that "diversity" and other such post-'60s shibboleths are race- and gender-specific. Hetero white men are overrepresented by their very existence.

White Guilt and Morally Lazy Revolution

Annalee Newitz finds a cultural thread in the plot of Avatar:

These are movies about white guilt. Our main white characters realize that they are complicit in a system which is destroying aliens, AKA people of color - their cultures, their habitats, and their populations. The whites realize this when they begin to assimilate into the "alien" cultures and see things from a new perspective. To purge their overwhelming sense of guilt, they switch sides, become "race traitors," and fight against their old comrades. But then they go beyond assimilation and become leaders of the people they once oppressed. This is the essence of the white guilt fantasy, laid bare. It's not just a wish to be absolved of the crimes whites have committed against people of color; it's not just a wish to join the side of moral justice in battle. It's a wish to lead people of color from the inside rather than from the (oppressive, white) outside.

For his part, Mark Shea, through whom I found the above, notes a scriptural archetype:

... I can't help but notice that a similar dynamic occurs within Scripture as well, only without the dynamic of self congratulation. Moses, for instance, is precisely the guilty SWPL [stuff white people like] type in his universe. Fetched out of the Nile and raised by Pharaoh's daughter, he apparently knows, but doesn't do much about the fact that he is a Hebrew. This goes on for forty years. The guy lives in the lap of luxury while his tribe is sweating as slaves. Then, one day, in a fit of social consciousness, the dilettante rich kid who wants to feel like he has a purpose murders an Egyptian who was beating a Hebrew slave and ditches the body. Next day, this preppy from the Ivory Tower comes upon a couple of Hebrews quarrelling and deigns to swoop in and break it up. The slaves basically tell him to buzz off ("oh, and everybody knows what *you* did"). Turns out the whole "Brothers! Join me!" schtick doesn't play real well in Peoria and people resent SWPL types working out their Hero's Journey fantasies at their expense. So Moses the Savior Preppy gets scared and hotfoots it to the desert when he realizes his little Weatherman moment of Killing for the Revolution is likely to cost him something.

St. Paul came more readily to my mind than Moses, as the persecutor of Christians who became among their foundational voices. As Shea notes, Moses was a Hebrew displaced among Egyptian royalty; in contrast, Paul was a hardline Jew who sought to extend Christianity even to gentiles after Jesus called him. In either case, however, the biblical figures whom we hear echoing in modern white-guilt sci-fi bring to the fore an important area of emphasis that neither Newitz nor Shea mentions.

The standard of the white-guilt genre isn't merely that the privileged protagonist gets to play revolutionary, nor even merely that the fantasy allows him to dominate the coloreds in a good, liberating way rather than a negative, oppressive way. The more fundamental quality is that the proud "race traitor" never has to grapple with the history or legitimate claims of the people against whom he turns. He takes the minority's position and fights his native majority without the complications of having to explain to the minority where its own perspective is erroneous.

Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt, sure, but he hardly freed them to return to some idyllic state. St. Paul took up the Christian cause, but the message that he promoted was quite distinct from "as you were." Indeed, the form of salvation that Jesus promised, as Messiah, was not freedom from domination by some other worldly tribe, but the freedom of domination by the highest divine power. In Matthew 10:36, Jesus explains it to be His mission to make "one's enemies... those of his household," but it isn't a physical battle on behalf of an oppressed neighbor. It's a charge through our shared humanity toward its fulfillment.

In the modern liberal gospel, one gains salvation by acknowledging the superior claims and moral virtue of the Other. The call isn't to advance one's community toward a more perfect expression of its own virtues — which have, in fact, done immeasurable good in the history of mankind — but to abandon one's community as hopelessly corrupt and in need of correction by a more innocent people. The former is the hard work of cultural evolution; the latter is the simple balm of revolution.

A Pre-Old School Jersey Boy

Shortly after commenter BobN mentioned Guido Beach in response to my post on reality TV, I came across this related post by Ed Driscoll. Driscoll points the way to this early/mid-'90s video about Wildwood, New Jersey, which as it happens was the specific site of my own early-'90s Jersey Shore romps.

It's all coming back to me, now.

The summer after I'd decided to drop out of college was the last during which my friends and I made the three-hour trip down the Garden State Parkway to Wildwood, and the reason, as I now recall, was an abrupt shift in the character of our summer getaway. While we were in high school, Seaside Heights (closer to the New York City suburbs) was the sleazier location. Wildwood was not yet done frightening away families and was fertile ground for the independent middle class teenage boys in search of the teenage daughters thereof.

As the '90s made the transition from early to mid, one of those jumbles of social cause and effect escalated the town's deterioration. That's about the time that the above-linked video appeared. Rolling Stone magazine chipped in with a profile of "The Prince of Wildwood" — a sex-crazed late-teen to whom I unfortunately related, back then. The gates of North Jersey hell opened, and we young, male, middle class predators — more interested in coming-of-age adventures than self defense — had to look elsewhere. As I wrote, in a song lyric, at the time:

Smiling faces are just a memory
And there's a battlefield where the party used to be
What used to be a beach is now a city street
Soldiers marching to a different beat

They've taken over Wildwood
Just like they ruin everything that once was good
They've taken over Wildwood
And I won't be here next year

The boardwalk's garbage from end to end
Flapping on the sea breeze in this two mile long pig-pen
All the promdressed teenagers that used to laugh out on the street
Must have known before I that it was time to retreat

[Chorus]

I remember fireworks on the balcony
Our cheers together, ears ringing with the sound
All the ashes now falling as glass
Raining shards of broken '40s on the ground
Dreams of margaritas frosted with ice
Whatever happened to our summer paradise?

Floating on the sea breeze somewhere before sunrise
Feels just the same if I close my eyes
Spent this vacation looking for a place to hide
But clientele means nothing to the rhythms of the tide

[Chorus]

Just when we'd found Point Pleasant, as the place of retreat for those whom we'd helped to chase out of Wildwood, I departed for Rhode Island, and New England and adulthood pulled me in.

To some extent, these are observations of a cyclical nature. On a personal level, people's interests tend to mature as they age, although adolescence is creeping further and further into adulthood and the level of maturity ultimately reached is arguably diminishing. On a social level, different clienteles consider a parade of locations fashionable, in keeping with their interests — with families seeking safe respite from hectic lives, young professionals edging in that direction, younger student-types following the older children of the families and emulating the young professionals, and the crowd deteriorating from there; the leading edge moves on, and the cycle starts again. But the speed of the cycle and the depths of deterioration appear to be escalating, in part because families do not appear to be keeping together as long or as thoroughly, and with fewer children, they no longer require vacation entertainment to span from pre-school through high-school and beyond.

To another extent, though, the same cycle appears to be happening on a much larger scale — that of the civilization — and civilizations do not merely ebb and flow in location and superficial details, as from one Jersey Shore boardwalk to another, but to change their character in the process. Some of us think that the character that is ebbing is worth fighting to preserve.

Surreality TV

A confession: I've played along from home with the reality TV show fad. As MTV's Real World spanned my life from high school to college, I used to joke that, were I on the show, I'd be the one kicked off midseason, and life confirmed that joke all too often. By the time Survivor hit the scene, I'd matured enough that my enjoyment derived from fascination with human interactions. Because of the competitive and touristic twists, I held on with Amazing Race until my schedule edged it out just a few seasons ago.

At this point, though, few would dispute the suggestion that it's time to rein the reality-TV culture in a bit. As Jonah Goldberg puts it, in a rhetorical question: "Can the rest of us afford to live in a society constantly auditioning to make an ass of itself on TV?"

Goldberg's launching point is the new bottom of the barrel, Jersey Shore, and it sounds as if the setting has only drifted further into the sea of cultural disintegration since the summers that I spent along that stretch of sand willing my life to go wrong. Sad to say, it looks as if my high school gang was of the trendsetting generation, in that regard, and this point from Goldberg brings the shame of that assessment home:

British historian Arnold Toynbee argued that civilizations thrive when the lower classes aspire to be like the upper classes, and they decay when the upper classes try to be like the lower classes. Looked at through this prism, it’s hard not to see America in a prolonged period of decay.

Back in the '90s, George Carlin had a stand-up comedy bit suggesting that the nation should replace prisons with four contiguous wall-in pens somewhere out in the middle of the country. Each pen would have a different sort of criminal, and the whole thing would be paid for by throwing open the doors between them all once every few years and selling the result on pay per view. A decade later, it would sadly be plausible to worry that Americans would begin deliberately following life paths that would land them on the show.

Facilitating Opportunity Is the Path to Charity

Reviewing Creating an Opportunity Society, by Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill, Duncan Currie emphasizes that advocates for the poor (and such) focus on the wrong measure of social progress:

Mobility, not inequality, is the key indicator of economic opportunity. The two are not necessarily correlated: If income inequality has gone up since the early 1980s, that doesn't necessarily mean income mobility has gone down. Indeed, a 2007 Treasury Department study concluded that "relative income mobility has neither increased nor decreased over the past 20 years." ...

[Haskins and Sawhill] advocate a three-pronged strategy for boosting mobility: Improve public education, encourage work, and strengthen families [especially by reining in the surge in nonmarital births].

This argument runs right along the line that divides the modern American left and right (at least those on either side who are socially conscious). On the left, the the thread across the three strategic issues is government-directed action. Not trusting the masses to contrive a fair system, progressives wish to utilize the Smart Class to lay out a plan that the government can then implement objectively. On the right, we're a bit less convinced of mankind's capacity, first, to comprehend all of the necessary variables that an all-encompassing plan must consider and, then, to collect and apply the dictatorial force necessary without corrupting those who must perform the implementation.

And so, focusing on the conservative side of the comparison, the keys to strengthening public education are liberty and choice — giving those closest to the children (especially their parents) as much room as possible to determine the best focus and structure for educating them. The keys to encouraging work are to maximize incentive by removing long-term handouts and to ease the path from concept to profit — removing regulations and other restrictions that keep prices up and competition down. The keys to strengthening families are to be clear about the ways in which various relationships are similar and different and, with an emphasis on cultural institutions, to encourage the behavior appropriate to each — or, conversely, to encourage those inclined to a particular behavior toward the appropriate relationship types.

It is patently false to accuse those who agree with the preceding paragraph of not caring for people in need. Indeed, it is long overdue for naturally conservative groups, such as the Roman Catholic Church, to take the longer view, which is more in keeping with notions of individual autonomy.

A Sunday Night Aphorism for Western Culture

Friday night was my construction company's Christmas party, and it won't surprise Anchor Rising readers to hear that I spent most of it bantering with a twentysomething carpenter who is currently straining his daily energies to take night classes in Boston. Having vivid memories of the automotive experience that such an endeavor entails made my attitude entirely sympathetic... until I mentioned that I "read" War and Peace as a book-on-tape during my commutes and he offered that he's listening to Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States.

The conversation devolved quickly to assertions of absolutes (me) and quips about relativism (him). I held that the White Man was essentially the most successful tribe, whose success brought the world culture to the understanding of higher principles — higher civilization — from Christianity to science. He put forward the image of tribal peoples blissful in their ignorance, as if the apple by which mankind fell from the garden arrived on a European ship.

Well, anyway, we were several beers and a long workday in, by that point, having been shoulder to shoulder for two days installing a tin ceiling in somebody's kitchen (no Sistine Chapel, that), and I've heard similarly heated arguments over comparative quarterbacks. But it occurred to me, while doing the Sunday night dishes, that what I'd been struggling to convey boils down to this: Western Civilization made it possible to know that some of its own actions while advancing were wrong, and then to move forward.

The wish of Zinnites and other Marxists to deconstruct that legacy is ultimately a desire to transcend by returning to ignorance and tribalism.

When the Children Aren't the Future

Mark Steyn looks to Vermont for the creeping of Europe's demographic trends into the United States:

... in a very basic sense there is no "state": Graying ponytailed hippies and chichi gay couples aren't enough of a population base to run a functioning jurisdiction. To modify Howard Dean, Vermont is the way liberals think America ought to be, and you can't make a living in it. So if you're a cash-poor but land-rich native Vermonter taxed and regulated and hedged in on every front, you face a choice: In the new North Country folk wisdom, they won't let you fish, so you might as well cut bait. Your outhouse is in breach of zoning regulations, so you might as well get off the pot. Etc. When he ran for president, Howard Dean was said to have inspired America's youth. In Vermont, he mainly inspired them to move somewhere else. The number of young adults fell by 20 percent during the Dean years. And what's left is a demographic disaster: The state's women have the second lowest birthrate in the nation, and the state's workforce is already America's oldest. Last year, Chris Lafakis of Moody's predicted Vermont would have "a really stagnant economy" not this year or this half-decade but for the next 30 years.

Government policies throughout the states and nation are decreasingly oriented toward providing incentive for personal responsibility and responsible behavior, and the up-and-coming generations are dutifully deciding that they'd rather focus on modern society's banquet of material pleasures than deal with the difficulties that we in the West used to consider fulfilling... however antiquated that concept may now seem.

Steyn quips that Western elites have no problem behaving as if "we can transform the very heavens" when it comes to climate change, but "the demographic death spiral" is "just a fact of life." Two things: Western elites ultimately prefer nature to humanity, and nature is ambivalent about its state, whereas humanity is content to choose demise.

A Positive Unintended Consequence of Controversy

Mary Eberstadt notes that, leading up to the turn of the millennium, the taboo against pedophilia appeared to be next up on the list of cultural norms to undermine:

The phenomenon of pedophilia chic revealed the intensely troubling possibility that society, especially literate and enlightened society, was in the process of sanctioning certain exceptions to the taboo against sex with minors—particularly sex between men and boys. As a matter of criminal law, of course, girls are often and tragically the victims of older men. But pedophilia chic concerned not the rate of criminal conviction but rather the open public questioning of the taboo itself. What the record through the 1990s showed was that in the case of girls the taboo remained solid, and in the case of boys it did not. In other words, to take the example before us now, had Roman Polanski been arrested for the same crime a decade ago, in all likelihood we would have witnessed the same outcry that we did this fall.

So now let us ask the more difficult question: Would Polanski in 2009 still have inadvertently united almost everyone in America against him if his victim had been a thirteen-year-old boy rather than a thirteen-year-old girl? The answer, perhaps surprisingly, is yes—and for interesting if unexpected reasons.

Winding through some indicators of that "pedophilia chic," Eberstadt concludes that the scandal in the American Catholic Church forced "literate and enlightened society" to reposition its opinion so as to permit moral outrage against cultural conservatives. It's an interesting suggestion, and it certainly doesn't conflict with experience with human nature.

One might also suggest similar reactions within the Church, itself. We can hope, for example, that church leaders will be wary of the judgments and suggestions of secular society such as informed organizational decisions in the late '60s and '70s. (The human frailty that begets the sorts of cover-ups that we witnessed in subsequent decades is probably beyond our ability to eliminate, although we can be more watchful.)

More broadly, it may be that the Church is in the process of reevaluating its relationship with and role in American society. One needn't enumerate the examples of public school teachers who've been found to have abused their positions with children and teenagers to suggest that representatives of Christ must hold themselves to a higher standard. And one needn't engage politicians in the dispute over their claims to define Catholicism as rightfully as bishops in order to discern that religion's role, and therefore its standards, must be of a different sort than those compiled and applied within secular spheres.

The challenge is to make the beneficial reactions to horrible actions outlast the damage that those actions did to the Church's standing.

Turning the Tide on Toy Totin' Tots: Prov and East Prov to Hold Toy Gun "Buy"-Backs

If I were the type to cling to my guns and paranoia, this might strike me as some sort of pre-conditioning. "Look, Johnny and Suzie, it's normal to hand your guns to the nice man from the government."

Children in Providence and East Providence can trade toy guns for real candy or toys on Friday and Saturday.

In Providence, children can feed their toy guns to the "Bash-O-Matic," a device designed and built by students at the New England Institute of Technology and the Rhode Island School of Design, Rhode Island Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch said.

The annual "Holiday Toy Gun Bash" will give an alternate toy to each child who relinquishes a gun from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday at Pleasant View Elementary School, 50 Obadiah Brown Road, Providence.

In any event, toy guns have been around for as long as the real thing. The correlation to gun violence, then, is quizzical at best.

Weeping for the Future

In the comments to this morning's post on Bush's reviving poll numbers, Mike Cappelli expresses his concerns, generally, about the attitudes and worldviews of up-and-coming generations. It brought to mind something that I've noticed, as if all of a sudden, over the past year: This texting thing has become a real problem on the construction site. It's as if the younger guys feel some obligation — a compulsion — to respond when their phones buzz at their hips. Add that to the strange argument that I've heard, around here, that legislation against texting while driving was an assault on the young, and I'm not ashamed to admit being a fuddy-duddy of the sort who just doesn't get it.

I can't imagine stopping work on a regular basis to send quick messages to my friends, wherever they might be. Frankly, if I run another project in the near future, I'll have no tolerance for it. Similarly, I can't imagine being caught texting while driving and not feeling as if I've done something wrong.

Obviously, I'm a fan of information technology and connectedness, but some of the effects are going to have much broader consequences than we currently comprehend.

Anti-Intellectual Radicals

I've been meaning to offer kudos for this excellent letter by David Carlin, who is, somewhat surprisingly, a sociology and philosophy professor at CCRI:

The question of whether or not anti-SSM people are motivated by bigotry is an empirical question, and I submit (as would Dr. Harrop, I believe) that if their motives were empirically examined, it would be discovered that they are not so motivated. But those associated with the gay movement are rarely interested in this empirical question. Instead — behaving in a purely propagandistic and thoroughly unscientific manner — they simply classify anybody opposed to their agenda as "bigoted" and "homophobic." Thus no amount of empirical evidence to the contrary will persuade them to withdraw their accusations.

One of my great objections to the gay movement is its profound anti-intellectualism — that is, its absolute refusal to keep its mind open to empirical evidence that might contradict its propaganda.

That's from the November 22 Providence Journal. I wonder whether the professor's had any threats against his job, or the like.

No Fingers Weaving Quick Minarets

You've seen this news, I imagine:

Swiss voters on Sunday overwhelmingly approved a constitutional ban on minarets, barring construction of the iconic mosque towers in a surprise move that put Switzerland at the forefront of a European backlash against a growing Muslim population.

Muslim groups in Switzerland and abroad condemned the vote as biased and anti-Islamic. Business groups said the decision hurts Switzerland's international standing and could damage relations with Muslim nations and wealthy investors who bank, travel and shop there.

The entire world is condemning the result, and I certainly don't support the action. I do, however, support the right of the Swiss to take it.

A point of intolerable repression exists, of course, but if we cannot distinguish banning a particular type of religious structure from, say, unjust imprisonment, then relativism has numbed our moral senses. People have a right to shape their communities, and they have a right to differ on the appropriate means of preserving their cultures.

Random Mutterings

Having some kind of head cold nastiness for the better part of a week has left me more befuddled than usual and less able to focus thanks to various apothecary concoctions. Here's what I've been muttering about....

Apparently, Gen. Treasurer Frank Caprio is going to campaign as a right-of-center progressive.

Tiger Woods has garnered a reputation for being in the 99 9/10th percentile when it comes to mental toughness and discipline. It looks like that only extends to his golf game.

Latino leaders calling for a census boycott are only going to end up short-changing themselves and their people. Some think that's a good thing.

Seeing it through in Afghanistan means more troops, according to the experts (Generals). President Obama did the right thing in following their advice, if not exactly. But it is obvious that his heart isn't in it and that ennui is dangerous if translated down the chain of command.

Seeing sleeping cadets/midshipmen at a mid-evening speech by a politician is totally unsurprising to anyone who attended such an institution. Long days full of physical and mental strain cause the body to shutdown when it can. It's only a surprise that more weren't snoozing. The fault lay with the media for focusing on the slumbering in an attempt to convey...what, exactly? That cadets don't respect the CinC? Or that he's boring them? Not sure why they did it, but it was wrong.

Looks like the Patriots are in a rebuilding year. That used to mean a losing season or two; now it's just an early bow-out of the playoffs. I'll take it.

I like visiting other branches of the family for Thanksgiving. But I miss the leftovers.

When did regular exercise start meaning a constant battle against wear and tear injuries? Plantar fasciitis sucks.

It seems hard for a member of the Gen X vanguard like myself to find good music by new artists.

And when did the music of the '80s become oldies?

I think the last two items are related.

Thank God for Nyquil.

Finally, my science-degreed sister (medical technology) had the best Climategate-inspired line of the season: "I could totally prove the existence of Santa Claus, but I seemed to have lost the raw data, so you're just going to have to trust me."

A Proper Progress

Father John Kiley steps forward to defend the Western period of exploration as a time when we "began to also hope in progress," not in religion alone. Indeed, Fr. Kiley credits the likes of Christopher Columbus and Leonardo de Vinci not just with their particular discoveries and innovations, but with the whole technological drive of our culture. There should, of course, be a restraint:

Pope Benedict correctly laments the fracture that occurred between hope in faith that marked the Middle Ages and hope in progress that distinguishes the modern era. Too much hope in human progress crowds out God in modern times just as exclusive hope in faith left little room for progress in the earlier era. Clearly, the two hopes are not incompatible. The God who made the spiritual world also fashioned the material world. Both heaven and earth are certainly worthy of investigation and exploration. Hope in progress alone sadly does lead to atom bombs and abortion procedures and corporate expansion. But progress enlightened by faith can fashion this world into a fuller reflection of the goodness and kindness of God himself.

Sadly, we are creatures of extremes. We seek a rule and insist that it must apply to everything and all. We tend to believe either that working with material reality is playing God or that any manipulation that gives the impression of benefiting us must be justified.

The Cringing Generation

The end of a recent Mark Steyn column on the nanny state's murder of the "reasonable man" standard rings too true not to pass along:

Sikhs like to carry their traditional kirpans — knives up to eight inches — and the New York City Board of Education and the Supreme Court of Canada, among many others, have ruled that boys are permitted to take them to school. Why? Because in the ideological hierarchy, multiculturalism trumps "safety". A cake knife is a "deadly weapon" but a deadly weapon is merely the Sikh symbol for "the power of truth to cut through untruth". If that isn't reason to ban it from public schools, I don't know what is. Nevertheless, if you're taking a cake to school, ask a Sikh classmate to cut it up for you. And be grateful that the FDA hasn't yet classified the cake as a deadly weapon.

Can such a society survive? I doubt it. After all, if you raise your young in such a world, what sort of adults do they grow into? A couple of years back, a neighbor's kid was given a plastic sword and shield as a birthday present. Mom refuses to let her boy play with "militaristic" toys, so she confiscated the sword but, in a moment of weakness, let him keep the shield. And for a while, on my drive down to town, I'd pass the li'l tyke in the yard playing with his beloved shield, mastering the art of cringing and cowering against unseen blows from all directions. In a hyper-regulated world, it's a useful skill to acquire. But I'm not sure it will be enough.

Also About Refashioning America

A fair number of people who might be said to lean right — libertarians and moderates and such — would do well to consider a review of the current standing of Catholic charities by Archbishop Charles Chaput, of Denver:

When we look closely at Church-state conflicts in America, we see that they now often center on a group of behaviors—homosexual activity, contraception, abortion, and the like—that the state in recent years has redefined as essential and nonnegotiable rights. Critics rarely dispute the Church's work fighting injustice, helping community development, or serving persons in need. But that's no longer enough. Now they demand that the Church must submit her identity and mission to the state's promotion of these newly alleged rights—despite the constant Catholic teaching that these behaviors are personal moral tragedies that can lead to deep social injustices. ...

In squeezing the Church and other mediating institutions out of the public square, government naturally assumes more power over the nation's economic and social life. Civil society becomes subordinated to the state. And the state then increasingly sees itself as the primary shared identity of its citizens. But this is utterly alien to—and in fact, an exact contradiction of—what America's founders intended.

Those who find their sympathies drawn to forced assertions of individual liberty have a tendency to miss the ways in which rules that allow for true plurality — even to the point of allowing individuals and organizations to discriminate in ways that we might not like — safeguard their own preferred freedoms. The reason big-government types like the notion that the government is the nation's "shared identity" is that, on that basis, they see a path toward reworking that identity with a direct application of their influence on the government.

It's a dangerously attractive notion to conceive of America's uniqueness as deriving from its non-ethnic unity. We are a nation of laws, to be sure, but that is only a positive, constructive innovation if the laws are not leveraged to define culture in the way that ethnicity traditionally has.

Michael Morse is No Huggy Bear

From a Rescuing Providence post of a couple of weeks ago.

Are his experiences unique and a result of his blogular fame or is he correct that there is a trend among younger men to give manly hugs as greeting?

What is up with all this handshake huggy stuff all the young guys are doing now? Every time I go to shake somebodies hand who happens to be under thirty they drag me in and give me a hug. Don’t like it. Nothing personal, but I like my space.

* * *

From here on, if anybody attempts to hug me during a handshake, I will be forced to assume I’m being brought close for something deadly, a shiv attack or worse, and respond with deadly force of my own. The ancient Babble-on-ians started the handshake as a means of holding their enemies hand to avert an attack. That’s when men were men, no hugging allowed. I like it that way, nice and simple. ...

Deny Fathers (and Reality) at Your Peril

Fr. John Kiley makes an excellent point in an RI Catholic column that is, for some reason, not online:

And it is not just television that demeans men. Catholics would be surprised how often a priest goes to another parish to celebrate Mass only to find all the male pronouns penciled out of the Sacramentary and Lectionary. Some have taken the liberty of revising the Sign of the Cross with its explicit use of the male terms "Father" and "Son" into the gender neutral "in the name of the Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier."

Thus a warm relationship (father/son) is replaced by three anonymous functions. The recent novel "The Death of a Pope" narrates a discussion resulting in God being addressed as "Our Parent" rather than "Our Father." Mary Daley, a professor at Boston College no less, sees the fatherhood of God to be a mere extension of male domination. Man reads himself into God. Her book is chillingly entitled, "Beyond God the Father."

Our society has had (and will always have) work to do ironing prejudices and other markers of human error out of the culture, but attempting to expedite the process through the control of language is an attempt to recreate the world according to our own specifications. Jesus Himself used the "Father" construction frequently and deeply; it must have consequences to insist that the word choice was arbitrarily made within a context of patriarchal oppression.

A Memory of Now

If you're of a mind to direct your thoughts away from the particulars of the day — shootings and bombs and recession and government expansion — David Goldman's essay on the use of rhythm and expectation to imbue a sense of the sacred into music is worth your time. There is a point, though, where our imaginative limitations strain the grand theories:

Augustine is not concerned with time in the abstract, but rather with the possibility of communication between God and humankind. "Lord, since ­eternity is yours, are you ignorant of what I say to you? Or do you see in time, what passes in time?" Aristotle's Prime Mover has no need to communicate with humans and, for that matter, no means of doing so. Aristotle's static time can have no interaction with the eternity of the biblical God—which means that if Aristotle’s description of time as a sequence of moments were adequate, we could not hope to commune with an eternal being.

But Aristotle's theory, in Augustine's view, leads to absurdities. To consider durations in time, we must measure what is past, for the moment as such has no duration. Events that have passed no longer exist, leaving us in the paradoxical position of seeking to measure what does not exist. Augustine's solution is that memory of events, rather than the events themselves, is what we compare. "It is in you, my mind, that I measure times," he concludes. If the measurement of small intervals of time occurs in the mind, then what can we say about our perception of distant past and future? If our perception of past events depends on memory, then our thoughts about future events depend on expectation, and what links both is "
"consideration." For "the mind expects, it considers, it remembers; so that which it expects, through that which it considers, passes into that which it remembers."

Expectation and memory, Augustine adds, determine our perception of distant past and future: "It is not then future time that is long, for as yet it is not: But a long future, is 'a long expectation of the future,' nor is it time past, which now is not, that is long; but a long past is 'a long memory of the past.'" This is the insight that allows Augustine to link perception of time to the remembrance of revelation and the expectation of redemption.

If one knows the rules that a particular piece of music is following, then the musical moment has a sort of intrinsic memory even apart from the past and future, telling the tale of what's been and what is yet to come. In life, this is especially true. Imagine that you could freeze everything else but you in time; you could pick somebody you don't know and inspect the incidentals of his or her life and learn quite a bit the individual's past and future. Layer into that an ability to measure momentary emotions, and differences in perception of the passage of time aren't really an obstacle to communication.

My point is this (I suppose): We communicate with each other and with God through our actions. Indeed, it's central to the Christian understanding of Jesus that God communicated with us in precisely that manner.

Of course, my remarks, here, are wholly tangential to Goldman's discussion of the intersection of philosophical and musical theory, which, dealing in two human conventions, can be complete of its own accord.

A Biological Ghetto

In the June/July issue of First Things, Mary Eberstadt suggested commonality between pro-lifers and vegetarians that (she thinks) justifies closer affiliation. Think what you may about the thesis, on which I'm not sold, a subsequent letter from a gentleman named Gerald Lame brings us back to dualism:

So Eberstadt's "moral traditionalists" are really animist-vitalists. And the news these pro-lifers have not yet heard, trapped as many are in their scholastic ghetto, is that the scientific theory of vitalism was found in the twentieth century to be false. The entire science of molecular biology is a testament to this fact. It turns out that there is no life principle. Life is a set of properties belonging to a suitably organized physical organism. These properties are the same for humans and nonhumans, for animals and plants. What distinguishes us is not some mysterious entity called human life. It is the structures of our bodies, especially our brains, and what they do. So a person is not a life. Animism is false. The mere fact that an embryo is alive does not mean that the person who might later arise from it is in any sense present. Life is not a proper object of sympathy.

He provides insufficient evidence to confidently declare him guilty of the practice, but Lame appears to be of the sort who extrapolate from mechanical understanding inappropriate philosophical lessons. He relies on "personhood" as something outside of biology and "life" but doggedly stops short of the next step into mire. If "life is a set of properties belonging to a suitably organized physical organism," then one could define "personhood" as the combination of those properties with a genetically unique organism. Lame must inevitably fall back to the old argument about consciousness.

The pro-life argument, especially in a theological milieu, is that biological life and spiritual personhood are inextricably linked. Not unlike an aborigine believing that a photograph steals the soul, Lame implies that describing the biology negates the person. Accuse whomever he may of intellectual ghettoism, the track in which his argument lies is well traveled and fraught with moral pitfalls.

For example, in a previous paragraph, he describes the biological process of pain and notes that young fetuses are incapable of feeling it. But if opposition to killing a human organism is essentially a question of suffering, then inducing euphoria prior to ceasing the flow of impulses that animate a biological construct in the form of a human being would alleviate "moral intuitions" that even a person is "a proper object of sympathy."

No Price Tag Doesn't Mean No Price

Professor Stephen Mathis has come across my post responding to his op-ed, and he comments, in part:

I think the ultimate problem with devaluing people or their organs is problematic precisely because it makes them vulnerable to more powerful folks. But I do disagree that disallowing a price tag on organs makes them worthless: I think it simply makes them incommensurable with money, which marks off their special status as things that are unlike everyday commodities. The same goes for laws outlawing the selling of sex. Making it impossible to buy or sell sex doesn't make it worthless, rather it delineates it as something so special it shouldn't be open to the pressures of the market (that usually come from the powerful/rich).

I don't know Mr. Mathis's background, but I'd suggest the possibility that he's just never encountered a situation in which he's needed a sufficient amount of money that would justify the sale of a body part. I'll tell you the honest truth: I'd part with certain bodily properties if I could thereby erase my debt.

The economics are unavoidable: Every body part has an abstract value; that we disallow their sale just removes the motivation to assign a dollar amount to it. The same is true of sex, although the value is so much lower, and unlike organs, its sale doesn't deprive the seller of its use, so some people will always make the transaction, whatever the law says.

No Sympathy for the Demented

Not to go all social conservative on you, but I have to believe that there are (or should be) more pressing issues for the head of a civil liberties organization than protecting an industry set on selling the sexual objectification of children. But there goes the ACLU's Steven Brown:

Legislation passed last week to make sex-trafficking of minors a felony is so broad, he told the Senate Judiciary Committee, that it could make criminals of people who profit from sexually-explicit art depicting minors. ...

The allegedly offending language in the human-trafficking legislation defines "sexually-explicit performance" as "an act or show, intended to arouse, satisfy the sexual desires of, or appeal to the prurient interests of patrons or viewers, whether public or private, live, photographed, recorded or videotaped." Anyone found guilty of such an offense would face up to 40 years in prison and a $40,000 fine, or both.

"Theoretically, it could be a theater owner," the state's chief civil libertarian told Political Scene. Or "somebody who takes photographs of minors deemed to appeal to prurient interests ..."

Personally, I'd have stricken the phrase about "prurient interests," and been clearer about the meaning of "sexually-explicit," but several other factors make it unnecessary, even odd, to fear for theater owners who behave in ways that we'd all agree oughtn't be criminal:

• It's fanciful to imagine that the judiciary, as constituted for the foreseeable future, will seek to interpret art as "intended" for the purpose of arousal.
• Legal precedent providing first amendment protection to pornography ensures the first point, and if producers must take extra care with actual children, well, I'd be hard-pressed to explain why an artistic statement requires the use of actual children for sexual purposes.
• I continue to believe that it should be deemed appropriate for states to be more stringent, in their rules, than is the federal government. If Rhode Islanders don't wish to allow the public display of children in sexually explicit situations, then there are 49 other states in which peddlers of filth could display their sickness.

A Difficult Judgmentalism

While by no means condoning his behavior, some commenters decline to judge the lifestyle of George Holland, which Marc described on Thursday. Writes Joe:

I don't know - it seems the guy was genuinely liked by these women [with whom he fathered children] - they probably wouldn't all get on the same page to fabricate a story if he were that bad. I don't like to judge other peoples' lifestyle arrangements because there are "conventional" families wherein the worst imaginable types of abuse occur, out of sight, out of mind.

Our society has determined that non-judgmentalism is a virtue, but it seems to me to be as facile and irresponsible as a judgmentalism that follows a strict, unconsidered line and conveniently exempts the behavior of the person who's being judgmental. Passing judgment shouldn't be done frivolously or as a means of directing attention away from one's own behavior, but leveling all personal decisions ignores millennia of cultural experience and shirking the duty to exert individual social pressure ensures that we'll all pay the price, in the forms of both government cleanup and cultural decay.

Tabetha offers anecdotal evidence of one such abusive "conventional family":

Lakesha Garrett, who was recently accused of murder, was once a promising straight A student at Classical HS with 3 scholarships lined up for college. I know this because she and I were very close friends as teenagers. However, she was the victim of horrible abuse - abuse so terrible that there is actually a child abuse law in RI named for her family. To the outside world, Lakesha came from a "conventional" family. Her mom and dad were married, she and her siblings shared the same two parents, and her parents were outwardly religious, church-going folks who owned several rental properties in the West End and Southside area. However, there was a much darker side to this family. ... So, while the children of this guy Holland may not be living in what many consider ideal circumstances, perhaps they will turn out much more well-adjusted than some kids that you think are living with "proper" families. The mothers of these children may be doing a better job than some of the families you think are great. I don't know since I don't know these people myself. It is not always easy to see where children are most open to harm.

Perhaps. Maybe. Earlier, Tabetha implies that the children of folks like Holland might be justifiably removed, but it shouldn't be difficult to find examples of foster and adoptive homes that turned abusive.

Humanity isn't formed with cookie cutters, and few are entirely evil. Therefore, it isn't enough to say that one guy who resigned his children to an "unconventional family" was decent and tried to do the best for them, while this other family looked normal and did horrible things to their kids. If Holland had made the not-so-difficult decision to limit his fatherhood experience to the mother and children with whom he'd begun, it's reasonable to suggest that he would have advanced in a more healthy direction, rather than a direction such as Tabetha describes in the Garretts. On the other hand, imagine if Mr. Garrett had lived after Holland's example.

Holland's children and others who've observed his story have learned from him and from the women's reactions, that his behavior was just fine. And maybe we could accept that if the qualities that mitigated the effects, on his part, were universal. But his sons might not be so apt to consider their children. His daughters might not see similar behavior in their boyfriends as a warning sign. To the extent that societal approval affects those who are making the right decisions (and the effect isn't nil), why should they work so hard at building families and restraining their temptations when they'd avoid negative reactions were they to freewheel just shy of abuse and drug dealing?

Pretending that we don't know where this path leads when taken not by a single family, but by a society, is irresponsible and doesn't absolve us of guilt any more than freely pointing fingers at everybody else does.

"He Wasn't No Bad Man."

The ProJo's follow-up to the story about the murder of accused woman-beater and "serial father" George Holland only adds to the frustration earlier expressed.

On Wednesday afternoon, the five other mothers and Holland’s relatives gathered at an apartment on Hymer Street to talk about his life. They said Holland had been characterized unfairly in The Journal as an abuser.

“There was also love there,” said Candace Smith, a niece. “He took care of his children. He spent time with them. The mothers [of his children] put aside all of their differences, and the kids spent time with all of their mothers.”

Leihani Rose — who has three children with Holland — and Silvia Vides, Melissa DeCosta, Keiojfa Hie and Jessenia Delossantos –– each with one child from Holland –– said that he made them all a family. They hugged each other and said in unison, “We love our baby mamas!”

As Holland had other children with other women, he painted houses and was also dealing drugs, his parents said. He could make money that way to help support his eight children, their mothers and his family –– and because his criminal record and lack of an education made it hard for him to find work, said Clement.

He paid the rent on their apartments, and got cable TV, a flat-screen television, new sneakers and new clothes for his mother. “He always got me what I needed,” she said.

He had money for anyone who needed help, they said. “He wasn’t no bad man. He took care of all of us,” DeCosta said.

ADDENDUM: Comments are open, but be forewarned: I'll close them, as the ProJo was forced to do, if they get outside the bounds.

All You Can Do is Just Shake Your Head...

...at stories like this, about the Providence woman who stabbed the father of her son to death. The short version is that 14 years ago a 15 year old boy was statutorily raped by a woman 10 years his senior. She bore him the first of many children by multiple baby-mamas. Two weeks after the birth of their child, the troubled youth threatened his son's mother, so she put a restraining order on him. Yet, they eventually reconciled and she even took it upon herself to care for his children by other mothers (whom he also beat). Several charges were filed and dropped. Finally, it came to a head and the rapist stabbed the serial woman-beater to death.

There are no winners. Not the beater, not the rapist, not the kids, not the other baby mamas. And not the taxpayers who continue to support this unaccountable sub-culture, which helps the victims less than it does the politicians and bureaucrats and advocates who feed off the programs purported to help. So we're left to shake our heads and throw our hands in the air. Is there a solution? I don't know. But how can we ever hope to "fix" society when we maintain the current lax environment of moral enablement and mitigate, if not unintentionally reward, bad decisions while people are allowed to get away with, well,.... murder?

Can't Be "Private, But"

A comment from Joe Bernstein, to yesterday's post on assisted suicide, points us toward a deeper conversation:

I am pro-life on the issue of abortion, but on this I believe that if someone with all their mental faculties intact makes a decision to commit suicide due to a hopeless, painful, or tortuous medical situation it is not a crime for someone else with the correct credentials to help them make sure they go out with the least discomfort to themselves and the least trauma to their loved ones.

Sticking a gun in your mouth and pulling the trigger is a surefire way to accomplish suicide, but not everyone can do it, and it leaves a scene families will never be able to put out of their minds.
I sat with my grandmother who lived with us, and my father many years later as they declined in severe pain due to terminal cancer-neither considered suicide, in one case due to religious belief, and in the other case, just the opposite.

I agree with Patrick here. What I don't want to see is the demonic social engineers that infest this administration set up a bureaucracy for this kind of thing. It is a private matter.

The problem is that, once you introduce restrictions such as judging mental faculties and credentialing assistants, the matter is no longer private, strictly speaking. Indeed, it is the argument of the Wesley Smith essay to which I linked that assisted-suicide ideologues are not inclined to dwell very long, on an individual basis, determining whether somebody is mentally fit to enlist their services, and they're certainly not inclined to report questionable cases to the authorities.

Moreover, the "private matter" boundary is anything but an impermeable barrier. Take this story as allegory:

The case came to the attention of Minnesota authorities in March 2008 when an anti-suicide activist in Britain alerted them that someone in the state was using the Internet to manipulate people into killing themselves.

Last May, a Minnesota task force on Internet crimes searched Melchert-Dinkel's computer and found a Web chat between him and the young Canadian woman describing the best way to tie knots. In their search warrant, investigators said Melchert-Dinkel "admitted he has asked persons to watch their suicide via webcam but has not done so." ...

The report also said Melchert-Dinkel checked himself into a hospital in January. A nurse's assessment said he had a "suicide fetish" and had formed suicide pacts online that he didn't intend to carry out.

Few people are as overtly demented as Melchert-Dinkel, of course, but if we're going to determine who is or is not fit to kill themselves, we're also going to have to determine who is or is not fit to make that judgment and to assist. Either determination ultimately draws arbitrary, debatable lines that will not withstand the human slide toward tragedy that is nigh upon inevitable when our society pushes "compassion" in advance of the tragic.

The Prick of Local Authority

What to make of the story of the teacher who accidentally stapled a student's head?

A Superior Court judge has upheld the firing of a Smithfield social studies teacher for stapling a student's scalp during a classroom stunt three years ago.

Judge Daniel A. Procaccini ruled that the Smithfield School Committee, the state education commissioner and the state Board of Regents for Elementary and Secondary Education Appeals Committee showed "good and just cause" in finding that Bethany St. Pierre should be dismissed from her job as a Smithfield High School social studies teacher after injuring a student and then urging the class to cover it up.

The education commissioner's finding of facts, in February 2008, offers a good summary of the incident (PDF). As ever, multiple issues come into play. Should the teacher have been fired for the accident? Absolutely not; our attempts at an antiseptic society contribute (I believe) to a bevy of our current problems, including educational mediocrity. Should she have been fired for not taking appropriate steps that would have alerted other adults to the incident and suggesting that the students keep the incident in the classroom? Probably not, although her first reaction clearly should have been to send the student to the nurse, personally notify the principal, and send a note to the parents (or pick up the phone) to explain the incident. But was the school within its rights to fire her for a mere error of judgment? Yes.

Look, the courts should not be a mechanism for interested parties (such as unions or private associations, like church groups) to leverage higher tiers of government to micromanage the decisions of officials in lower tiers. Resolve the issue through the administrative and political processes available for that purpose. Relying on the judiciary merely lets everybody in power off the hook.

If Not the Law, the Culture

Two well-placed articles — by virtue of their proximity to each other — in the September 21 National Review point to a necessary conclusion for a modern conservative political philosophy. The first item is an interior quotation by American Medical Association lobbyist William Woodward within a book review by Kyle Smith (emphasis added):

The trouble is that we are looking on narcotic addiction solely as a vice. It is a vice, but like all vices, it is based on human nature. The use of narcotics ... represents an effort on the part of the individual to adjust himself to some difficult situation in his life. He will take one thing to stimulate him, another to quiet him.... And until we develop young men and young women who are able to suffer a little and exercise a certain amount of control, even though it may be inconvenient and unpleasant to do so, we are going to have a considerable amount of addiction to narcotics and addiction to other drugs.

The solution, in short, is cultural. Rather than struggling to stop our fellow Americans from doing something that they've decided they want to do, we should address that which sparks the desire. That point in itself could be the beginning of an extensive prudential and practical tangent, but let's take it as given on principle and move on to the second item: Ross Douthat's review of Quentin Tarantino's latest gorefest, Inglourious Basterds. Douthat's core dilemma is whether Tarantino's film-making talent makes up for the characteristic violence:

As for whether the many pleasures of this counterfactual fantasia are sufficient to justify enduring the interludes of sophomoric and debasing violence, well, I'm still wrestling with that one. But it's clear that where the wildly talented, permanently adolescent Quentin Tarantino is concerned, we're unlikely ever to get the one without the other.

If, for item 1, we're going to arrive at a solution along the conservative-libertarian compromise, then the conservative's answer to Douthat must be "no." It's not impossible for violence to be redeemed within a work of art, but then it ceases to be sophomoric and debasing, because it isn't gratuitous — much like the violence that God allows in life. But if the scale houses, on one side, a continued cultural desensitization to violence and pollution of the individual's conscience, then placing aesthetic pleasure on the other side will hardly move the needle.

(Note for libertarians: I'm not, here, proposing a ban — just a posture for conservatives.)

Links to various articles

Power Line on Taking the National Debt Seriously

Stephen Spruiell on Obamacare Dissected: Ten things that probably will be in the health-care bill (but shouldn’t)

Kevin Williamson on Real Health-Care Reform: Ten things that ought to be in the health-care bill (but probably won’t)

Veronique de Rugy on Elinor Ostrom and the Essence of Economics

Matt Welch on The Unknown War: The defeat of communism 20 years ago was the most liberating moment in history. So why don't we talk about it more?

Jagdish Bhagwati on Feeble Critiques: Capitalism's Petty Detractors

Power Line on Democrats to Curtail Free Speech

Cato on What Does the State Department Not Want Us to Know about Honduras?

John Derbyshire on The Thatcher Giant

ADDENDUM #1:

Larry Kudlow on The Mundell-Laffer Solution: A stable King Dollar and lower tax rates could save the nation at this critical juncture

Harsanyi on The doers against the "thinkers"

Russ Roberts on Stimulus in the Real World

Victor Davis Hanson on The Power of Payback

Milton Friedman on 4 Ways to Spend Money

Milton Friedman on Libertarianism (Part 1 of 4)

Milton Friedman on Libertarianism (Part 2 of 4)

Milton Friedman on Libertarianism (Part 3 of 4)

Milton Friedman on Libertarianism (Part 4 of 4)

Friedman and Sowell on Equality

The Cross as Symbol

The Mojave Cross boxed in plywood so as not to offend may be the perfect symbol of tyrannical multiculturalism. Erected 75 years ago in memory of the nation's World War I casualties — and with strong visual correlation with the plain crosses that have a long cultural pedigree along roads — the cross has been the subject of a separation of church and state dispute that has reached the Supreme Court. Moreover, it fittingly reflects the zealous drive to rid America of any public reminder of Christian heritage.

A new twist, though, has the potential to unite religious and libertarian conservatives:

Several conservative justices seemed open to the Obama administration's argument that Congress' decision to transfer to private ownership the land on which the cross sits ends any government endorsement of the cross and takes care of the constitutional questions.

"Isn't that a sensible interpretation" of a court order prohibiting the cross' display on government property? Justice Samuel Alito asked.

The liberal justices, on the other hand, indicated that they agree with a federal appeals court that ruled that the land transfer was a sort of end-run around the First Amendment prohibition against government endorsement of religion.

The argument against permitting religious symbols on public land is that it implies an endorsement of the represented beliefs. Even if we accept that as a plausible argument, the idea that the endorsement is furthered by divesting of the land in order to avoid destruction of the symbol is perverse. It also illustrates the dangers of permitting government ownership of anything: the opportunity to force beliefs — or disbelief — is too attractive for fanatics not to erase and rewrite.

Protesting the Brown U Protest of Cristoforo Colombo

Noon, Monday, by the flagpole on Brown University's Main Green. Organized by WPRO's John DePetro, the Brown Spectator and the Brown College Republicans.

From John DePetro's press release.

... the decision by the faculty at Brown University to change the name of the Columbus Day holiday is "a tremendous insult to all Italian-Americans." DePetro said he would be happy to accept the resignations from members of the Brown faculty at the rally," to clear their conscience of teaching at a school built upon the slave trade." " This grossly misguided farce to try to ignore and destroy the historic contribution made by one of the world's greatest explorers is not only insulting to Italian-Americans, but is a very disturbing reminder of how America's traditional heritage is under attack in many quarters of the Ivy League and on other college campuses," DePetro says.

[Irreverent side note: does the fact that Columbus apparently navigated by a map given to him by aliens - space aliens - at all mitigate his image in the eyes of his Brown critics?]

From Marc's post in April when the Brown faculty voted to recognize the boycott.

Of course Europeans didn't cover themselves in glory with the way they treated the indigenous people of the New World. Man has made war upon man for time immemorial. As "anyone who has studied history" should know, the difference is only a matter of degree.

It does make me wonder. Is it only the violence committed by the "victors" that is objectionable?

"Multiculturalism" Is a Lack of Culture

Ah, the not-so-rich tapestry of multiculturalism:

"We're supposed to be the most multicultural city in the world and it doesn't seem terribly inclusive," Denny Alexander explained. It, as it turns out, is ten-year-old playground equipment found in two parks in the west end of Toronto. The offending objects depict the biblical story of Noah's Ark, complete with cute pictures of animals in male-female pairings. In the most multicultural city in the world, that just won't do. The equipment won't be removed immediately, but the city had decided that, when it "wears out," it won't be replaced. "Toronto's motto is Diversity our Strength," wrote councilman Adam Giambrone. "City policies across the board look to reflect our multicultural city. One way of doing that is not focusing on any specific cultural or religious tradition." You really can't better that line about how awful it is for an inclusive city to, um, include something biblical.

A story about an old guy who gathers procreative pairs of all animals into a giant boat in order to preserve their species from extinction during a great flood is apparently harmful to children, in the public sphere. One wonders whether it's the fact that it's in the Bible that causes the problem or the participation of God in the narrative.

In third-grade public school music class, we learned a song about Noah's building the ark — "Who built the ark? Noah! Noah!" We're getting to the point, I fear, that Mr. C, as the teacher requested that we call him, would be brought before an international tribunal for teaching us such propaganda. In the United States, that sort of thing is preserved for the president.

Following Up the "Prostitute" Accusation

Callers to Dan Yorke's show, after the exchanges with both Megan Andelloux and Donna Hughes were particularly incensed by the latter's referring to the former as a "prostitute." What Hughes meant (and said that she meant) was Andelloux's sideline as a "foot fetish model." A 2008 Providence Phoenix article about her offers the description that she goes to parties monthly at which men pay to "admire her feet."

The article is not specific about where the boundaries of "admiration" are (and I, for one, am not particularly interested to know). One would hope, on Hughes's behalf, that she knows a bit more that might justify the accusation of "prostitution" — as opposed to, say, "stripper" or "erotic model" or something. Take my word for it, though, that Professor Hughes has information about activities in Rhode Island that would make even the worldly shudder.

Given limited information — especially in the context of a targeted conversation on talk radio — it isn't unreasonable to suggest that "prostitute" might have been hyperbolic but not, strictly speaking, inapplicable. It's worth noting that Andelloux's response, when Dan pressed her on the accusation, was that she doesn't "call [herself] a prostitute," has never taken money in exchange for intercourse, and has never done anything "illegal."

ADDENDUM:

Not unrelatedly, Andelloux dissembled when Dan asked her, in response to an email from me, about her husband's affinity for abortion, casting it as simply a procedure that he — like many medical students and doctors — knows how to do. In actuality, it's the one specific medical intention he lists on his Daily Kos bio:

RPCV Senegal 99-01, Resident Family Doc in RI, Future abortion provider.

ADDENDUM II:

Just realized that this post doesn't link to my June post about Mr. and Mrs. Andelloux.

They Should Make a Movie About It

Instapundit's been following liberal (and especially entertainment elite) support for Roman Polanksi, notably in this post. Each celebrity who signs on to the "Free Roman" cause of the week should be asked to read the court documents describing the rape for which he's wanted.

There's simply no excuse, and evading the law for decades doesn't mitigate the crime. Although it appears to mitigate it very much, in the eyes of some, if you happen to be famous.

The Immortality That We Already Have

As we slide into autumn, with the sensations and associations that it brings, Michael Ledeen's musing on the relationship between the living and the dead in Naples seems more relevant now than it did in the summer edition of First Things. He makes some very interesting points, which resonate with greater strength as the trees promise (or threaten, depending on your perspective) to shed their leaves:

The great divide between Naples and the rest of Europe came in the second half of the nineteenth century, following the unification of Italy. For several hundred years, the continent had seen enormous religious and political wars, culminating in the Napoleonic war that came to an end at Waterloo in 1812. From then until the outbreak of the First World War, there was no continent-wide war. In that remarkably tranquil century, the Western attitude toward death underwent a striking evolution. Previously, death had been understood as altogether normal. In the nineteenth century, it came to be viewed as a violent intrusion into human affairs. The thought of leaving the world of the living became unbearable, and the requirement to remember the dead became a social imperative. ...

It would require a greater understanding of the human spirit than we possess to explain why the passionate Western embrace of the dead emerged at the moment when, for the first time in hundreds of years, so few people were actually dying in combat or in violent epidemics of the sort that had ravaged Naples so many times. But the new vision of death—and the importance of the dead—undoubtedly had something to do with the rise of modern nationalism, which incorporated religious rituals into secular political ceremonies. As religion was driven out the front door of respectable thought, it crept back in through political cults of the sort that eventually destroyed the heirs of the Enlightenment in the mass movements of the twentieth century. The core beliefs of the Enlightenment were unable to satisfy human passions, and, the more vigorously the intellectual elite asserted that science and logic could explain everything and eventually solve all problems, the more passionately people believed in otherworldly forces. The dead insisted on intruding into the otherwise ordered universe of the scientists and the philosophes.

Especially insightful is the mention of nationalists' usurpation of some of the compelling attributes of religion. To some extent, one could argue that nationalists leverage fear of death as a means of control, even as they present national identity as the path toward a sort of immortality. It's only natural that people would therefore create a darker mythology around the deceased.

Perhaps we're seeing something similar, now, as medical scientists push back death's boundaries, winning battles in the fight against it. A people can only ponder even more distinctly what it means to lose the war against death when they've been told that it's feasible to win.

If humanity somehow manages to approach worldly immortality, I suspect that the dead will become a universally ugly breed. More frightening than any staggering-zombie movie can convey. I also suspect that fear of death will become an even more potent weapon against the timid.

The remedy and defense has not and will not change, however. As the song says, just remember that death is not the end. Presented with a choice of two versions of immortality, that spent with God is more enticing than that spent gripping the thin reeds of an attenuating version of life. At least in my book.

Re: Conserving Civilization - The Coliseum

Like Justin, I read Michael Knox Beran's piece about the loss of the marketplace (the agora) with interest. Beran contrasted the emptying agora (the town square or marketplace) with the filling up of castles both old and new built. Beran points to an upper class culture striven for by the modern day aristocrats (czars and the like) and the wannabe's (academia and the professional class) who look to migrate to wealthy burbs and McMansions while leaving behind the village or town squares.

A rapid growth in population and a vast expansion of commerce overwhelmed the old centers. At the same time the rise of the nationstate and its metropolitan elites made the provincial agoras seem, well, provincial. The provinces, Tocqueville wrote, "had come under the thrall of the metropolis, which attracted to itself all that was most vital in the nation." The traditional patrons of agora culture, the merchant princes who were once proud of their market squares, abandoned them to ape the gentry. The man of business found it infra dig to live near his shop; he built himself a mansion in a fashionable aristocratic district. New technology further diminished the appeal of the old forums as people turned to radio, cinema, and television for amusement.

Even so, the civic focal point might have survived if people had cared about it. But the rationale was forgotten. During the last few centuries the traditional artistry of the marketplace has come to seem merely quaint and even irrational. Modern planners who studied the old market squares failed to see, beneath a surface of heterogeneous activity, the unity of a civic whole.

The ancient coliseum's were built for spectacles that could entertain the masses. Often playing to the lowest common denominator, the entertainment kept the rabble happy and, hopefully, made them forget their lot in life. While today's sport culture in America serves the same purpose (I'm a proud member of the rabble, by the way), if less violently (well, except maybe with MMA), there is also more going on than "here we are now, entertain us" or the simple sating of the basic human need to belong to something bigger, like The Team.

If you've ever tailgated at a professional or college football game, you know that the conversation is quite broader than simply going over the impending game. While the purpose of the coliseum and the games played within may be the same as ever--people go to games to forget about life's problems for a while--they also collect people together to socialize and gossip and talk about their lives and the world. This temporary community is an offshoot of a shared sense of team, but it lingers past the day's game and is not confined to time spent in the coliseum. It expands into lives outside of the coliseum and encompass the apparently peripheral. The recent retirement speech made by Detroit Tigers' broadcaster Ernie Harwell provides a glimpse into a common ethos and respect for tradition that is fostered in the bleachers.

It's a wonderful night for me. I really feel lucky to be here, and I want to thank you for that warm welcome. I want to express my deep appreciation to Mike Ilitch, Dave Dombrowski and the Tigers for that video salute and also for the many great things they've done for me and my family throughout my career here with the Tigers.

In my almost 92 years on this Earth, the good Lord has blessed me with a great journey, and the blessed part of that journey is that it's going to end here in the great state of Michigan. I deeply appreciate the people of Michigan. I love their grit. I love the way they face life. I love the family values they have. And you Tiger fans are the greatest fans of all, no question about that.

And I certainly want to thank you from the depth of my heart for your devotion, your support, your loyalty and your love. Thank you very much, and God bless you.

This can also be scaled down from the coliseum to the local sports field. In many ways, while mimicing the games played in the coliseum, youth sports bring us much closer to the agora . Parents and volunteers must get together, navigate egos and differing opinions and run the operation so that kids can learn life lessons that competition can provide. Along the way, tasks are completed, obstacles overcome and the shared sense of community is deepened. The sport may be what brings people together, but it serves as an entry point into all manner of topics that are discussed at meetings and at the fields. In fact, often times, the game on the field is really only background noise to the talk on the sidelines!

Most importantly, sports gather together people from all walks of life, from everywhere on the social and economic ladder. But youth or higher-level sports aren't the only vehicle for the establishment of civic spirit. There are all sorts of activities that help build community in the same way, from the Boy Scouts to the Buckeye Brook Coalition. They just aren't all centralized in the same physical marketplace idealized by Beran.

Yet, the function or spirit that comes out of the coliseum isn't the same as that of the agora. It's certain that the coliseum of today--that American sports culture--doesn't exactly approach the artistic culture for which Beran pines (does "Let's Get it Started" qualify as high art?). The physical spaces of today's sports culture simply can't accomodate--or probably won't welcome--Beran's agora ideal. We aren't going to be seeing half-time concertos or the 6th Inning Operatic Moment any time soon. Maybe it isn't the kind of civilization Beran would like to conserve. But don't let the face paint and team jersey's fool you. Right now, many of the people for whom Beran is looking are in stadiums and on playing fields, cheering on their teams and talking about everything under the sun.

Conserving Civilization

Michael Knox Beran raises, to my mind, a cultural reality that conservatives would do well to address when he describes the effects that losing the local marketplace (the agora) has had:

No civilization, even the most bovine, can entirely do without this cathartic machinery. Aristotle credited the poetry of the agora with forming the character of citizens and easing the psychic burdens of common life. Modern scientists have only now begun to catch up with him. They speculate that music and gossip, the lifeblood of the marketplace, meet a human need. Anthropologist Robin Dunbar supposes that music, language, and gossip evolved as "vocal grooming" tools in early hominid groups which had grown too large to rely on touchy-feely grooming techniques to promote cohesion. If Dunbar is right, Virgil and Theocritus were on to something when they made their shepherds use poetry as a grooming tool and music as a means of keeping their flocks together. Plato applied the same pastoral insight to the grooming of citizens. If the herdsman is "the master of the music best suited to his herd," so the agora culture of the polis perfected the music best suited to the human flock that constitutes the community.

Arguably, modern technology is to blame for much of the difficulty that conservatives have in promoting cultural events, because cars and electronics have spaced us out and provided in-home entertainment. Strolling to the town square for a puppet show isn't typically an option, anymore, and high-culture entertainment tends also to be high cost. There isn't the aggregate demand, that is, for average citizens to fund performances of cultural depth in a gathering place, and it ultimately proves culturally destructive — and, in any case, is morally inappropriate — for government bodies to choose content.

So, the conservative might go so far as to accept public investment in functional real estate, and perhaps a public festival here and there, but as Beran argues:

The only hope of regeneration, it seems to me, lies in experiments in civic artistry undertaken by philanthropists eager to refurbish the culture of the marketplace. One thinks of Poundbury, the little city, rich in civic focal points, that the Prince of Wales commissioned the architect Leon Krier to build in Dorset. Poundbury has attracted a good deal of attention, and it and the model towns of such "new urbanist" architects as Andres Duany and Elizabeth PlaterZyberk might conceivably inspire a broader civic movement, much as Thoreau's experiment at Walden Pond inspired the environmental movement. Most people today recognize the importance of conserving natural resources, though naturally they differ concerning the means. A time may come when people will insist as passionately on the necessity of conserving cultural resources.

Even as a private endeavor, lines are drawn in a contrary direction:

To infuse new life into the agora, conservatives will need to enlist the energies of people they long ago stopped talking to, but who will be necessary to any effort to revive the poetic-grooming side of the market square. There is a certain kind of person who, like Jude Fawley in Hardy's Jude the Obscure, fulfills his nature in the adornment of a community. When the civic focal point thrived, these artists had a place in the community and a means of getting bread. They carved the stone, frescoed the walls, painted the ceilings, gilded the domes, composed the masques and harlequinades. But the agora in which they might once have become absorbed is gone. They are today rebels without a cause, misfits who dine off grant money and alienation from the marketplace, and create art that is generally faithful to the solipsistic bleakness of their situation. A conservative philosophy of civic renewal could give them the transfiguring work they need.

I have no clever closing, here, but have identified the topic as food for further thought. It all comes back to encouraging conservative principles — and living them out. Getting involved in community events. Seeking and commissioning the wares and productions of artists. Just generally seeing the value in an aspect of social life that's easy to lose in the mad rush of the day to day.

Of course, it's plain to see that folks would be more apt to do such things were more of their resources left to them to disperse.

Oh Happy Commerce, or, "I felt like I was forcing myself on a 40+ year old fat sex slave"

"Where the hell else is a middle aged man gonna hook up with a young sexy hot sex slave in real life? Like the old saying goes, we want a ***** [whore] in the bedroom but a lady in the kitchen. Just don'